Many years of successful partnership with the Faculty of Informatics at Masaryk University has led to an extraordinary five-year contract confirming Red Hat’s long-term intention to support and develop research cooperation in cybersecurity. Red Hat also plans to extend the research collaboration in the AI realm and other research areas aligned with Red Hat Research’s strategic priorities. Support for future IT talent is another facet of the partnership, as Red Hat engineers work with students through teaching, research projects, and thesis guidance.
The research collaboration with Masaryk University will further focus on ongoing research projects, such as the EU Horizon-supported Cybersecurity Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia (CHESS) consortium, an umbrella for Czech-Estonian cooperation for research and innovation in the field of cybersecurity, and the sec-certs project. Sec-certs has the goal of processing Common Criteria and FIPS 140 security certificates and related documents into machine-readable form to enable analysis of this data, for example to find known vulnerabilities. One mark of the sec-certs project’s success is the regular use of its tooling by Red Hat Security Compliance engineers. Recently, the project was demoed at the International Common Criteria Conference in Qatar, extending its impact to the broader open source community.
Masaryk University was one of the first Red Hat’s university partners, dating back to 2007. Initially the collaboration started through involving research engineers in teaching courses and leading students’ final theses. Since seeing the interest of many students, Red Hat and the university have expanded the scope of collaboration and engaging opportunities to multiple levels, resulting in Red Hat being one of FI’s Strategic Industry Partners, the highest category of possible partnerships.
The extraordinary form of the five-year contract, a departure from the university’s typical one-year contracts, is a result of the long-term partnership and mutual trust established over the years. “It brings guaranteed long-term financial support to Bachelor’s and Master’s students and especially PhD students. At the same time, it is a guarantee for the continuation of a successful partnership and the strength of common ties,” explains Jiří Barnát, Dean of FI MU, who welcomed the foreign delegation from Red Hat to the faculty on November 20, 2024. The friendly meeting took place in the new Chill-out Zone, which was created with the financial participation of Red Hat in the FI MU library.
