Smith’s Boyson and Mann Draw International Best Practice Award for Cyber Risk Portal

A preeminent professional organization in technology has selected Smith School research professor Sandor Boyson and CIO Holly Mann for its inaugural Cybersecurity Award for Practice.

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) recognized Boyson and Mann for developing the Cyber Risk Portal in the Supply Chain Management Center at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. School of Business. Designed to mitigate threats to suppliers of critical infrastructure components, systems and services, the platform engages businesses and organizations to anonymously upload data to compare their cybersecurity capabilities to existing standards, as well as to their peers and competitors.

Professor and center co-director Thomas Corsi, Smith PhD graduate John-Patrick Paraskevas, and research fellows Hart Rossman and Christopher Keegan have worked with Boyson and Mann in developing the portal, which, according to IEEE, has met the following standards for its award:

• Game-changing ideas that have substantially advanced, or have the potential to substantially advance, the practice of cybersecurity;
• Approaches for designing or building novel cybersecurity systems whose impact can be quantified in terms of cost, time, and/or effectiveness;
• Sustained leadership in cybersecurity research, policy, education, and-or enabling of best practices in implementation or engineering;
• Work accelerating tech transfer of cybersecurity products, toward the enabling of cost-aware, secure solutions.

Boyson accepted the award on behalf of his colleagues as part of the recent IEEE Security Development Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute also presented its ‘Award for Innovation’ to UMD computer science professor Dave Levin. "These awards highlight the cutting-edge cybersecurity work being done at the University of Maryland," says UMD computer science professor and Maryland Cybersecurity Center director Jonathan Katz in a related story. "Receiving awards for both theoretical and practical contributions, in quite different areas of cybersecurity, also demonstrates the amazing breadth of research going on here.”