A national laboratory that provides a practical environment for cyber security research and test-bedding of solutions against cyber threats was launched at the National University of Singapore (NUS) on Tuesday (Feb 21).

The National Cyber security Research and Development (R&D) Laboratory costs S$8.4 million which was funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), and it is competent of simulating the performance of more than a thousand computers to execute tasks like emulating large-scale malicious cyber attacks.

Research institutions and industry players have already tapped on the lab’s infrastructure to work on about 20 projects, which span areas such as software security improvements and cloud data storage safeguards.

NRF director of the program George Loh said the facility enabled experiments that were “complex, scalable and relevant to Singapore” to be demonstrated in a reliable testbed.

“This will facilitate innovation and translation of R&D capabilities in Singapore into solutions that can be deployed globally, helping to strengthen Singapore’s position as a cyber security R&D hub,” he added.

NUS and NRF also teamed up with local telco Singtel to launch a corporate cyber security lab in October last year, with the three parties pledging to pump S$43 million into the project over the next five years.