Aryaka, Carnegie Mellon’s CyLab to Research New Threat Mitigation Techniques

Aryaka and CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University’s Security and Privacy Institute, announced a strategic partnership to research new threat mitigation techniques and develop new enterprise networking and security solutions.

Under the partnership, Aryaka will provide funding and industry experts to assist more than 100 faculty members and 100 graduate students with research to identify, prioritize, and develop threat mitigation techniques. The hope is to make these techniques available as open source to help enterprises and security vendors to better defend against cyberattacks, CyLab’s Daniel Tkacik wrote.

The modern IT landscape is very different from when users were in offices and applications were in data centers, said Renuka Nadkarni, Aryaka’s chief product officer. Applications are now anywhere and users can access those applications regardless of their geographic location. Security needs to be reconsidered in the case of the application and not the network.

Aryaka is also the founding sponsor of CyLab’s Future Enterprise Security Initiative, a multi-disciplinary approach to making complex security solutions available and accessible. The initiative’s mission is to rethink “security across enterprise ecosystems through innovations in artificial intelligence, computer science, engineering, and human factors research,” Tkacik wrote.

Founded in 2003, CyLab is a public/private collaborative computer security and privacy research institute and is one of the largest security research centers in the US. Aryaka decided to partner with CyLab because of the university’s work in artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as in other fields such as humanities, psychology, and policy, wrote David Ginsburg, Aaryaka’s VP of product and solutions marketing. A multi-disciplinary approach gives researchers the opportunity to look at problems not just from the technology point of view, but to also consider attacker motivations and intent.

Aryaka will guide research topics, offer industry expertise, provide data sets for building AI models, and give feedback on techniques being developed.