S pend Your Future Inventing the Future

NSA's National Information Assurance Research Laboratory (NIARL) is the U.S. government's premier information assurance research and design center; our IA experts conduct and sponsor research in the technologies and techniques which will secure America's information systems of tomorrow. Our researchers aren't just inventing products—we're trying to invent a safer future.

Built upon a foundation of five decades of experience designing against threats from the most determined adversaries in the world, the IA Lab's extensive in-house research program now ranges from cryptographic algorithms to photonics, from operating systems like SELinux, to advanced intrusion detection tools. We complement the deep experience of our workforce with close and creative partnerships in high-technology—with industry, academia, government, and with colleagues scattered around the globe. If you are looking for a challenge, we guarantee our problem set will put your talents and training to the test. Come apprentice with the masters and help us make the world safer through IA.

RESEARCHERS
Our staff comprises chiefly of graduate-degreed Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, Engineers, and Physical Scientists. In applying that academic foundation to the IA mission, we have transcended the limits of our disciplines to become a community of IA designers and researchers. If you join us, we'll help you push the limits of your expertise to tackle the hard problems inherent in designing protection mechanisms which can stand the test of time.

At NSA, you have the potential to make much more than new products; you have the opportunity to make an enormous impact and leave your mark as a technical legend. Our inventions and patents offer notoriety, publishing opportunities, and sometimes even royalties for our workforce. Your work will also provide industry with building blocks to push the state-of-the-art in commercial IA and help millions of people across the Nation, now and in the future.

So, if being a designer of visionary capabilities—capabilities whose realization requires cutting-edge IA solutions—interests you, then consider joining NSA and the staff of NIARL in our quest to protect the Nation's critical information from an unfriendly world.

NIARL conducts in-house research in the following focus areas:

Cryptography — Our challenge is to create practical and secure cryptographic algorithms, architectures, and infrastructures. Unlike other security disciplines that design mechanisms to protect against today's technology, our Cryptographers design cryptographic algorithms to protect against technology that will exist far into the future.

Cryptographic Infrastructure and Standards — This focus area supports security standards for information systems. We lead and influence the development of cryptographic standards to satisfy current and anticipated customer requirements. Additionally, this focus area tackles the challenges inherent in designing and developing a future public key infrastructure (PKI) rigorous enough to support the most sensitive missions. Core elements include dynamic management of groups and group membership as well as the cryptography necessary to protect the distribution of cryptovariables. With both our cryptographic security standards and PKI efforts, we collaborate extensively with external subject matter experts, with other organizations within the Federal Government, and with our Allies.

High-confidence Software and Systems (HCSS) — One of the biggest challenges facing our Nation is the integrity of the software on which our society depends. Our HCSS focus area concentrates on techniques to be implemented early in the life cycle which ensure correctness and integrity.

Authentication — The globally-distributed enterprises of tomorrow assume the trustworthiness of each actor, device, service, and datum in the network. This focus area develops rigorous techniques for authenticating attributes, such as identity or location, of those constituents by integrating protocol design with intimate knowledge of hardware.

High-Speed Security Solutions — The high-speed team focuses on the engineering challenges inherent in securing high-bandwidth networks. Research tracks are in high-speed electronics, optical networking technologies, and the developing area of photonic logic research.

Secure Wireless Multimedia — The Secure Wireless Multimedia focus area's research goal is to enable end-to-end secure multimedia communications for mobile users.

Technical Security — This focus area addresses avenues for protecting information in the physical domain. We exploit our deep insight into materials and signal propagation to ensure no unencrypted information ever leaks out of our systems.

Network Dynamics — This group develops the theoretical basis for models of network behavior. Our ability to detect anomalous activity rests on a clear understanding of what is normal.

Secure Network Management — This focus area develops the specific mechanisms and middleware infrastructure necessary to safely harness distributed computing resources across heterogeneous networks. The current trend is to expand traditional client/server models to include distributed objects and mobile agents, as well as grid computing and peer-to-peer models in ad hoc network environments.

Secure Operating Systems — A secure operating system allows separation of information domains, confinement of processes, data integrity, and guaranteed invocation of processes. It can also prevent buffer overflow attacks and computer viruses from doing damage. Through SELinux, we demonstrate how to achieve these goals.

Privilege Management — Both the Intelligence Community and DoD need to be able to share information and collaborate situationally and selectively. This focus area explores new access control mechanisms which can help, such as trusted labeling, and virtual isolation and containment.

Attack, Sensing, Warning, and Response — This focus area seeks to increase the ability of the U.S. to defend its critical networks through detection and response. Our research includes development of effective methods for detecting and responding to cyber attacks including: intrusion detection systems, malicious code detection, attack attribution (also known as traceback), visualization, data reduction and analysis, and alert correlation.

Research Integration — Our Research Integration group creates proof-of-concept implementations which demonstrate new functionality and security to our customers in a concrete form.