RECYCIN: Reinforcing Competence in Cybersecurity of Critical Infrastructures: A Norway – US Partnership

Cybersecurity of critical infrastructure is of national interest and that to safeguard critical infrastructures requires a strong cybersecurity workforce. Norway and many other nations are facing challenges to produce enough cybersecurity professionals to meet the industry and public needs. The necessity for cybersecurity competence is stated as one of the strategic goals in the Norway’s National Cybersecurity Strategy. In Norway, few educational institutes have comprehensive cybersecurity programmes or courses, and most available courses are within Information Technology (IT) cybersecurity and not on Industrial Control Systems (ICS) cybersecurity. Moreover, the courses offered in Norway are primarily focused on technological aspects of cybersecurity and have limited scope on organizational and human aspects of cybersecurity.

The RECYCIN project will assimilate the competence and enable the Norway and US partner institutions to support the development of a state-of-the-art cybersecurity academic and research infrastructure. The project will connect education with industry needs and research institutes with higher education institutions to both provide advanced research and education in cybersecurity.

The activities of RECYCIN will support the cooperation between the partners, by:

  1. Establishing a roadmap for long-term partnership among the partner institutions, and promoting education, research and innovation to advance next generation cybersecurity in critical infrastructure.
  2. Sharing and co-developing undergraduate and graduate course on cybersecurity of critical infrastructure.
  3. Sharing and co-developing professional training materials.
  4. Developing mobility stays to cross pollinate cybersecurity expertise across the partner institutions. An objective of such exchanges of researchers is to support the development of study courses within cybersecurity at HIØ, NTNU and Virginia Tech.

This project is funded by the Research Council of Norway. This project is a collaboration between IFE, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Østfold University College (HiØ) and Virginia Tech.