The National Security Agency has chosen University of Hawai’i at Manoa as a featured school to help NSA build train future professionals and develop tools to counter cybersecurity threats.

NSA said Wednesday it will highlight the partnership on the agency’s official website, IntelligenceCareers portal and social media networks as part of the Featured School Series.

“In addition to helping military and civilian employees improve their language skills, UH MaÌ„noa is collaborating with us on cutting edge research, and they are training the next generation of cybersecurity experts,” said Capt. Kurtis Mole, commander of NSA in Hawai’i.

The agency began to collaborate with the university when the latter introduced a specialized course to the agency’s employees, which include military members in 2007.

“This not only prepares Hawai’i students for great jobs with NSA, one of our major employers, but also helps strengthen HawaiÊ»i’s overall cybersecurity across the public and private sectors,” said David Lassner, president of UH System.

A graduate student from UH Manoa’s Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications envisions the technologies to use visualization approaches that will assist research teams in studying large volumes of information.

UH Manoa received designation as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Research in 2014.

The Office of Management and Budget sent a letter to the Senate and House Armed Services Committees expressing concern on a provision in the Senate’s defense policy measure that would limit the Pentagon’s ability to develop a space-based missile defense architecture, C4ISRNET reported Thursday.

According to the report, the Senate’s proposed National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2020 would designate the Missile Defense Agency to oversee the development and deployment of the architecture designed to detect and track hypersonic weapons.

OMB said the Department of Defense should wait for the MDA to complete its analysis of alternatives and the Space Development Agency to finish its prototyping efforts before designating a lead agency and establishing design requirements.

Other issues raised by the Trump administration in the letter are the need to have a legislative authority to establish the Space Force; oversight of DoD execute orders; military operations in the information environment; authorized budget for unmanned surface vessels; and reprioritization of military construction funds to unrequested projects.

Russell Vought, acting OMB director, wrote in the letter that the administration commends the Senate’s support for the nuclear deterrent enterprise and supports the extension of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982.

Ashley Mahan, acting director of the General Services Administration’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, said FedRAMP is moving toward a threat-based approach to risk monitoring and authorization, Federal Times reported Wednesday.

“Right now, we’re working with various government agencies in obtaining that threat intelligence information, what kinds of threats are posed to our IT, and we’re literally mapping that to the suite of controls and security requirements that our cloud service providers meet,” Mahan said Wednesday at the Billington CyberSecurity conference in Washington, D.C.

She said adjusting the security requirements based on threat information would help agencies prepare for such vulnerabilities once they field their cloud platforms.

“It gives the agency the ability to start using the product faster … and not only that, we’re going to take that information and also apply it to continuous monitoring,” Mahan added.

The Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology directorate collaborates with technology vendors to increase the speed and scalability of security platforms used at government facilities, border checkpoints, airports and other public areas.

DHS S&T brought together subject matter experts, industry representatives and volunteers at the annual Biometric Technology Rally to showcase automated biometric platforms from 15 developers, the department said Wednesday.

The event aimed to help the private sector improve biometric scanning equipment through feedback from DHS components and other stakeholders.

“We are working with technology providers to clarify our expectations that the technology work more effectively for all users, reduce errors, make systems more cost-effective for governments, and offer a better user experience for the people undergoing the screening process,” said Arun Vemury, director of BI-TC.

DHS posted the results of the rally on the Maryland Test Facility website.