Through a practitioner-driven approach, CSD creates and deploys information resources—standards, frameworks, tools and technologies enabling seamless and secure interactions among homeland security stakeholders. With its wide-range of partnerships across federal agencies; state and municipal administrations and first responders; critical infrastructure sectors; Internet security researchers; universities; national laboratories and international organizations, CSD works to strengthen capabilities to communicate, share, visualize, analyze and protect information.

CSD leads the federal government’s efforts in funding cybersecurity research and development projects that result in transforming an idea to a deployable solution. Through an aggressive cybersecurity R&D lifecycle process—research, development, test, evaluation and transition to practice—CSD produces unclassified solutions that address today's complex challenges and can be implemented in both the public and private sectors.  In addition to being innovative, the division develops usable technologies, tools and techniques to defend, mitigate, and secure current and future systems, networks and critical infrastructures against cyber-attacks.

                            CSD's R&D Lifecycle Process

To accomplish its mission and serve its customers, CSD funds a wide range of cybersecurity projects aimed at improving security in both Federal networks and the larger Internet. 

• Assessment and Evaluation
• Cyber Analytics Behavior and Resilience
• Cyber Economic Incentives
• Cyber Physical Systems Security (CPSSEC)
• Cyber Security Forensics
• Cybersecurity Competitions
• Cybersecurity Incident Response Teams (CSIRT)
• Data Privacy Technologies
• Distributed Denial of Service Defense (DDoSD)
• Distributed Environment for Critical Infrastructure Decision-making Exercises (DECIDE)
• Enterprise Level Security Metrics and Usability
• Experimental Research Testbed (DETER)
• Experiments and Pilots
• Homeland Open Security Technology (HOST)
• Identity and Access Management
• Insider Threat
• Internet Measurement and Attack Modeling
• Leap Ahead Technologies
• Linking the Oil and Gas Industry to Improve Cybersecurity (LOGIIC)
• Mobile Technology Security
• Moving Target Defense (MTD)
• Process Control Systems (PCS) Security
• Research Data Repository (PREDICT)
• Secure Protocols
• Security of Cloud-Based Systems
• Software Assurance Marketplace (SWAMP)
• Software Quality Assurance
• Tailored Trustworthy Spaces
• Transition to Practice (TTP)
• Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP-G)