NSF Invests $25.4M into Cybersecurity and Privacy Research Projects
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The National Science Foundation’s Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program is one of the agency’s largest research initiatives.
The National Science Foundation announced Monday that it is investing $25.4 million to advance research and scale projects related to cybersecurity and privacy as part of its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program.
“The Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program is one of NSF's largest research programs, recognizing the criticality of cybersecurity and privacy to the nation’s economy and to citizens,” NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan said. “These investments support cybersecurity research across the country that can be translated into solutions that improve our quality of life.”
The awardees will aim to strengthen open-source supply chain security, increase computing privacy for marginalized populations and ensure trustworthy cloud computing. This will also support the Broadening Participation in Computing initiative, which aims to bring people from underrepresented groups into computing research.
This funding will go to several projects. Specifically, NSF awarded almost $850,000 to date, with the intent to award nearly $6.4 million in total, to a project led by North Carolina State University—Enabling a Secure and Trustworthy Software Supply Chain—which looks at open source supply chain security.
A University of Florida-led project—Securing the Future of Computing for Marginalized and Vulnerable Populations—has been awarded approximately $805,000 to date, with the intent to award over $4 million in total. This research will explore privacy and security issues for marginalized and vulnerable groups.
Additionally, the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing, led by Indiana University, was awarded about $527,000 to date, with the intent to award nearly $3 million in total, for its project that will utilize the “trusted execution environment” hardware in chips to run secure computation that cannot be compromised by malicious software.
“Now celebrating its 10th year, Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace continues to support a wide range of research topics, with approximately 200 research awards this year and over 3800 total lifetime awards,” Jeremy Epstein, lead program officer for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program, said. “These projects demonstrate the breadth of topics of importance in cybersecurity and privacy and the commitment of NSF to advance research on topics of national importance.”