UCCS won first place at the national Cyber Innovators Challenge in July, with a team composed of computer science Professor and Gallogly Endowed Engineering Chair in Cybersecurity Shouhuai Xu, PhD, and two doctoral students, Ekzhin Ear and Antonia Feffer.
Organized by National Security Innovation Network (NSIN), in partnership with Department of Defense University Consortium for Cybersecurity (UC2), the challenge event “aims to identify individuals or teams, capable of developing cutting-edge solutions to address critical cyber threats and challenges faced by the DoD.” Each competing team submits a proposal to address one of three problem areas from the categories of Modeling and Predictive Analytics, Persona and Influence, or Data and Permeability.
“Winning first place at this nationwide cyber innovators challenge is just another testimony of the cybersecurity research that we have undertaken at UCCS, especially after receiving the USCYBERCOM CyberRecon 2023 Analyst Award and the USCYBERCOM CyberRecon 2024 Hunter Award,” noted Xu.
Xu and his team submitted for Data and Permeability, winning with their solution of designing Multiple-Domain Range to enable multi-domain cyber operations, defining cyber wargaming scenarios and collecting data and using GenAI to generate high-fidelity data at scale.
The award comes with a $150,000 prize. The proposal leveraged Xu’s earlier CU Next Grant for the project “Creating CU Cyber Range to Make UCCS and CU Denver a National Leader in Cybersecurity Education and Workforce Development,” which will create two innovative cyber operations courses and the CU Cyber Range, an interactive simulation environment where students can experience realistic cyber attack scenarios. Xu is also in the process of negotiating with DoD/UC2 a research contract associated with this award-winning project.