Welcome to the UMBC Center for Information Security and Assurance!

You have reached the CISA website. We are a designated Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education by the National Security Agency. Check out the about us page for more information about our program.

Our lab, the Cyber Defense Lab (CDL), provides an isolated environment where students are provided a unique opportunity to research topics that would ordinarily be considered too dangerous to network and system resources or to be investigated in other computer labs. In order for all students to benefit from this lab, we have endeavored to provide course materials known as Cyber Defense Exercises (CDXs) for use by professors in the Computer Science Electrical Engineering and Information Systems departments at UMBC. These exercises can be used without lab access by use of a mobile laptop cart with preconfigured CDX images on them.

Additionally, we have a number of educational opportunities and some course webpages are available for current and prospective students. Currently, students are working on security problems in voting systems as well as continuing work on cyber defense exercises. Some students are also involved with the Punchscan project.