NSA director and commander of US Cyber Command Adm. Michael Rogers called on RSA 2016 attendees to work towards strengthening public-private partnerships, during a keynote presentation at the information security conference on Tuesday.
"We are not going to solve this within the government and the Department of Defense specifically," he said before launching a direct pitch to the audience of infosec professionals. "If you're interested in participating in some of those exercises, we're interested in speaking with you."
Rogers mentioned that US Cyber Command is engaged in partnerships with Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon, among other universities. Court papers filed last month showed that Carnegie Mellon conducted research on the Tor Project funded by the Department of Defense. In an earlier claim, Tor director Roger Dingledine wrote that CMU was paid $1 million by the FBI to hack Tor, although his claim has not been substantiated.
The NSA was driven by sector trends and the broad cybersecurity environment, including diminishing budgets for intelligence agencies, to launch NSA2021 last month, said Armstrong. The NSA2021 initiative pulls together the agency's offensive and defensive operations.
Rogers also said military and intelligence agencies such as the NSA can learn "the benefit of innovation" from private sector and Silicon Valley. "As much as I love the NSA, I am the first to admit that we are part of a large bureaucracy," he told the audience. "We want to operate in a broad partnership."
