Including Trusted CI in a Proposal

It's often the case that while writing a proposal you will identify a cybersecurity challenge suited to a collaboration with Trusted CI. As a project that serves the community as a Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE), Trusted CI provides support broadly to proposal writers. Please be aware that due to the number of requests we receive, we must be conservative in what we can commit to at the pre-proposal phase for unfunded collaborations. We offer the following suggestions to indicate your intent to engage with Trusted CI to solve the challenge, hence indicating in your proposal that you both recognize the challenge and take it seriously. We also provide guidance related to specific solicitations on our blog.

Identify and utilize Trusted CI resources. Our Framework provides recommendations and templates for establishing and maintaining cybersecurity programs. Our online training materials and webinars cover many cybersecurity topics tailored to the NSF CI community. Our annual cybersecurity summit provides a venue for training sessions for cybersecurity practitioners, technical leaders, and risk owners from within the NSF Large Facilities and CI community.

Indicate Your Intent to Approach Trusted CI. We invite proposing NSF CI projects to indicate their intention to approach Trusted CI once they are funded. Trusted CI resources and staff are available to assist NSF projects with cybersecurity plans and training, via consultations and other Trusted CI activities. Proposers are free to include language showing an awareness of cybersecurity of a specific issue and showing you are aware of Trusted CI, how we can help, and that you plan to approach us if funded to collaborate on addressing the issue. You can do this unilaterally without any commitment from Trusted CI (and please be aware it does not commit Trusted CI, we do our best to help all NSF projects, but are subject to our own resource availability). We ask that you let us know if you reference Trusted CI this way to help us plan ahead.

Possible language to include in a proposal:

Our proposal team recognizes [that cybersecurity is important for the effort we are undertaking | we have a cybersecurity challenge with regards to XXX]. To address this issue we plan to approach the NSF-funded Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (trustedci.org). The Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (CCoE) engages projects such as the one we propose to help them address cybersecurity challenges and maintain the trustworthy nature of the computational science we support. We understand that engagements with CCoE are collaborative, and have budgeted resources in our project to work with CCoE on our challenge.

Include Trusted CI as a funded partner in your Proposal. You can include one or more of the CCoE Partners (IU, LBNL, NCSA, PSC, U. Wisconsin) via a subcontract on your proposal, a process that provides a firm commitment of our participation. Please contact us to discuss which partner would be most appropriate, whether the commitment would be exclusive for a given solicitation, and the level of effort that would be involved. In this case, we would provide a custom letter of collaboration indicating our agreement to the terms of the subcontract.

Including Trusted CI in other ways. The above are examples and we are open to discussions on other collaborations not listed. If you are preparing a proposal and would like additional assistance from Trusted CI, don't hesitate to contact us to discuss how Trusted CI can help.