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Bro Center of Expertise

The Bro Center of Expertise is a central point of contact for institutions funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that bundles the Bro Team’s expertise and offers it to NSF-supported sites seeking advice.

Overview

The Center promotes Bro as a comprehensive, low-cost security capability for the NSF community. It provides guidance and support on all aspects of a Bro installation, devises reference scenarios for deployment and integration, and develops novel technical capabilities that cater to NSF environments. The Center 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 establish Bro effectively on their own. At a technical level, the Center is now the focal point of Bro’s open-source development, maintaining its code base and documentation.

The Center is based at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where it continues the institutions’ successful collaboration maintaining the Bro project. The Center’s team includes long-time members from research, operations, and engineering.

Background

The National Science Foundation’s investments into cyberinfrastructure have enabled the scientific community to build facilities and resources that have become critical to modern science and education. To protect these investments from intruders, many NSF-supported sites and projects are now deploying Bro. Originally a research project started in 1995, Bro has successfully bridged the traditional gap between academia and operations since its early versions. Bro’s users today include major universities, research labs, supercomputing centers, open-science communities, government institutions, and Fortune 50 companies.

The NSF community has widely embraced the system, as Bro’s flexible, scalable approach to security monitoring proves an excellent fit for open-science networks. In 2013, the NSF funded the Center as a three-year project (NSF Award) to support the NSF-community in deploying Bro. The Center focuses on three thrusts of work:

We provide assistance and guidance to NSF-supported organizations for installing and operating Bro installations of all sizes, from the smallest college networks to the largest scientific facilities.
At a technical level we pursue a range of engineering efforts to bring advanced Bro functionality to the NSF community.
We support the NSF research community in transitioning innovative networking and security technology into practice by using Bro as a deployment platform.