Joint NC State University-MCNC research aimed at making shared-space computing technologies more secure and adaptable has received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Engineers working on the research – dubbed "the Yalta project" by its creators – hope ultimately to develop networking technologies capable of supporting secure, efficient collaborations involving up to hundreds of individual participants on a public Internet.

The challenge, they say, is to provide Internet pathways and infrastructure that can accommodate the dynamic nature of large, long-term collaborations whose roster of members may change many times, without compromising the security of the information shared or the ease of access to it.

Principal investigators on the project are Dr. Gregory Byrd, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, and Dr. Fengmin Gong of MCNC's Advanced Networking Research Group. Daniel Stevenson, MCNC's director of next-generation Internet research, is serving as a consultant.

DARPA is the U.S. Department of Defense's central research and development organization.

Byrd joined the NC State faculty last year. His research focuses on high-performance parallel digital systems and high-performance network security.

He and his colleagues named their project "Yalta: A Collaborative Space for Secure Dynamic Coalitions," in reference to the famous World War II coalition formed at Yalta by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Soviet leader Josef Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.