Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Webcast Series

By all recent measures, the cybersecurity workforce is woefully understaffed. According to (ISC)², the cyber workforce gap in the United States was 377,000 open positions in 2021. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) has been working with the U.S. government to development novel approaches designed to shrink this gap. This talk will focus on open source initiatives that bring innovative ideas to cybersecurity modeling and simulation, assessment, and competitions

What Attendees will Learn:

• Understanding of the challenges facing the cyber workforce and how to build engaging content that will help close the workforce gap

• Where to find open source projects developed by the Software Engineering Institute to build cyber exercises, training labs and simulations

• Hands on experience that can be immediately applied to workforce development initiatives in their own organization

In this webcast, Carol Smith, Carrie Gardner, and Michael Mattarock discuss maturing artificial intelligence (AI) practices based on our current body of knowledge. Much as it did for software engineering in the 1980s, the SEI has begun formalizing the field of AI engineering, beginning with identifying three fundamental pillars to guide AI engineering: human-centered, scalable, and robust and secure. Watch to learn more about these pillars and how they can be used to help national defense and security agencies adopt and develop AI.

In this webcast, Shannon Gallagher and Dominic Ross discuss what deepfakes are, and how they are building AI/ML tech to distinguish real from fake. They will start with some well-known examples of deepfakes and discuss what makes them distinguishable as fake for people and computers.

Agile and DevSecOps have revolutionized software engineering practices. The strategies put forward in Agile and DevSecOps have eased many software engineering challenges and paved the way for continuous deployment pipelines. But what do you do when you're facing a problem that doesn't fit the model of a pure software engineering project?

In this webcast, we will share our experiences applying Agile and DevSecOps practices in atypical ways. We will focus our discussion around two atypical examples:

1) managing a program office's acquisition process 2) developing and maintaining computing enclave operations

Using these examples, we will discuss the specific applications of the tools and practices we used to enhance a team's capabilities and better support end users' missions. We will also share the lessons we learned along the way.

Complex, cyber-physical DoD systems, such as aircraft, depend on correct timing to properly and reliably execute crucial sensing, computing, and actuation functions. In this webcast, SEI staff members Bjorn Andersson, PhD, Dionisio de Niz, PhD, and William Vance of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation & Missile Center discuss using real-time software on multicore processors. Specifically, they review the challenges that DoD and civilian systems face and the proven solutions that are available.

The Forrester report, "The Definition of Modern Zero Trust," defines Zero Trust as an information security model that denies access to applications and data by default. Zero Trust adoption can be difficult for organizations to undertake. It is not a specific technology to adopt; instead, it's an initiative that an enterprise must understand, interpret, and implement. In this webcast, SEI CERT Division Director Greg Touhill, and Dr. Chase Cunningham, chief strategy officer at Ericom Software, answered questions and discussed what you need to implement a Zero Trust strategy.

What You Will Learn

• Why Zero Trust is a strategy and not a technology

• Steps to implement Zero Trust

• Examples of past compromises and historical failures that were not only enabled by, but powered by, inherent trust

The status quo for how we acquire cyber-physical weapon systems (CPS) needs to be changed. It is almost certain (for any acquisition of a CPS) that there will be cost overruns, schedule delays, and/or the loss of promised warfighter capability. Improved product development technologies could be applied, but they have not been adopted widely. We will discuss the status quo, alternative approaches, and how to motivate the community of CPS acquirers and suppliers to improve. What attendees will learn:

• Characteristics of the current status quo how CPS systems are acquired and developed.
• Principles of Value Engineering and how they can be applied to the acquisition and development of CPS.
• Approaches that acquirers and suppliers can take to improve the status quo.

In this episode, Grace Lewis and Shane McGraw discuss how the SEI is applying research, through its highly successful Tactical and AI-Enabled Systems (TAS) initiative, to develop foundational principles, innovative solutions, and best practices for architecting, developing, and deploying tactical and AI-enabled systems. These systems will provide solutions for teams operating in remote, tactical edge locations where computing resources are constrained.

Lewis and McGraw explain that the TAS initiative is seeking to add a software engineer to conduct research, build prototype technologies, and collaborate with military programs to introduce new technology. The results of this work will be seen in research papers that advance the state-of-the-art in software engineering and in the fielding of better tactical and AI-enabled systems.

We are hiring: Software Engineer https://cmu.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/SEI/job/Pittsburgh-PA/Software-Engineer_2017511-1

In this webcast, Carol Woody presents the scope of a cybersecurity engineering strategy for DevSecOps along with the criticality of sharing information with direct and indirect stakeholders.

In this webcast, Brett Tucker, Ryan Zanin, and Abid Adam discuss the critical factors for risk executives to be successful to not only protect critical assets but also to take advantage of new opportunities created via the pandemic.