Bro Center of Expertise for the NSF Community

Researchers at ICSI and NCSA are operating a center to provide support and guideance to the NSF community on customized Bro installations that meet the specific needs of research environments. They are simultaneously making improvements to Bro that benefit the community, and leveraging Bro as a deployment platform for networking research results.

Bro is an open source network security monitor (NSM) utilized by many NSF communities nationwide to protect their cyberinfrastructure. This project establishes a Bro Center of Expertise as a central point of contact for these communities to leverage Bro technology and expertise expertise. The activity reaches out to smaller NSF projects and communities, helping them to use Bro in the most cost-effective and sustainable way to protect their infrastructures.

This activity promotes Bro as a comprehensive, low-cost security capability for these communities, providing guidance and support on all aspects of a Bro installation. The project devises reference scenarios for deployment and integration, and develops novel technical capabilities that cater to NSF environments. The project supports existing Bro users in optimizing and extending their setups, and makes Bro's capabilities available to new sites and projects that lack the resources to deploy Bro effectively on their own. At a technical level, the project is the focal point of Bro's open-source development, maintaining its code base and documentation. To the research community, the project acts as a facilitator for transitioning networking research results into practice by leveraging Bro as a deployment platform.

Funding provided by NSF grant ACI-1348077, A Bro Center of Expertise for the NSF Community.