IUCRC Planning Grant Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Cybersecurity, Insurance, and Resilience Center for Understanding and Innovation in Technology (CIRCUIT)

Cybersecurity is imperative for protecting the nation’s sixteen critical infrastructure sectors, from the electric grid to water utilities. Cybersecurity protects supply chains and safeguards and privacy of personal data on the Internet. Economic growth in the United States is also increasingly tied to the effective management of cyber risks.

Insurance is one key method of managing such risks. Focused on the private insurance sector, the Cybersecurity, Insurance, and Resilience Center for Understanding and Innovation in Technology (CIRCUIT) is an intellectual and practical hub for empirical research on cybersecurity modeling and its applications in managing critical infrastructure, mitigating catastrophic risks, and understanding evolving threats.

By improving how organizations anticipate, prevent, and recover from cyber incidents, CIRCUIT reduces the financial burden on taxpayers, who often bear the cost of cyber disasters and infrastructure recovery efforts. Through research, education, and outreach, the center develops tools and strategies that protect both public and private interests, ensuring that critical services remain operational and secure.

The U.S. economy relies on value creation through entrepreneurship, innovation, and the knowledge economy. Consider that more than 85% of the value of leading companies is tied up in intangible assets, also known as the knowledge economy. These assets require robust intellectual property and data protections, making cybersecurity both an industry need and a policy imperative.

Using this planning grant from the Industry-University Cooperative Research Centers (IUCRC) program, CIRCUIT identifies and addresses critical industry needs such as the development of uniform and precise policy language; the selection of performant contracted service providers to buttress policies; the creation of new data on the effectiveness of security controls to support underwriting; the identification of better exclusion strategies; and the automation of cyber risk underwriting with efficient auditing and claim management processes including empirically vetted security controls. These strategies, in turn, reduce the likelihood of costly recoveries after cyber attacks, strengthen national security, and foster economic stability by ensuring that businesses and essential services can recover quickly from cyber threats.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.