From: Nextgov

By Aliya Sternstein

Sandia National Laboratories on Tuesday will inaugurate a cybersecurity center to perform offensive and defensive warfighting techniques that onsite nuclear weapons scientists have been practicing for decades.

The Cybersecurity Engineering Research Laboratory, which began operating in 2011, draws from nuclear research and development to test hardware vulnerabilities in closed facilities and model cyberweapons on supercomputers, Sandia officials said. Cybersecurity is one of the New Mexico-based lab’s defense systems missions.

“Sandia’s cyber R&D capabilities are rooted in our [nuclear weapons] mission, and specifically weapons use-control engineering and adversarial threat assessment,” said Ben Cook, a senior manager for Sandia’s research and development science and engineering group.

Officials on Tuesday are expected to showcase several of the new lab’s capabilities in deflecting cyberattacks against citizens, businesses and governments. “Sandia was doing cyber before the term cyberspace existed,” states the national laboratory’s website.

One demonstration will have students don electrode-studded caps that record the electrical activity of the brain, normally to spot tumors.  In this situation, the electroencephalograph headwear will track brain activity changes when students are doing math work to document and compare the skill level of cyber defenders.

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