April 2024: SPHERE - Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation

Cybersecurity and privacy threats increasingly impact our daily lives, our national infrastructures, and our industry. Recent newsworthy attacks targeted nationally important infrastructure, our government, our researchers, and research facilities. The landscape of what needs to be protected and from what threats is rapidly evolving as new technologies are released and threat actors improve their capabilities through experience and close collaboration. Meanwhile, defenders often work in isolation, use private data and facilities, and produce defenses that are quickly outpaced by new threats. To transform cybersecurity and privacy research into a highly integrated, community-wide effort, researchers need a common, rich, representative research infrastructure that meets the needs across all members of the community, and facilitates reproducible science.

To meet these needs, USC Information Sciences Institute and Northeastern University have been funded by the NSF mid-scale research infrastructure program to build Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation (SPHERE). This infrastructure will offer access to an unprecedented variety of hardware, software, and other resources connected by user-configurable network substrate, and protected by a set of security policies uniquely aligned with cybersecurity and privacy research needs. SPHERE will offer six user portals, closely aligned with needs of different user groups. It will support reproducible research through a combination of infrastructure services (easy experiment packaging, sharing and reuse) and community engagement activities (development of realistic experimentation environments and contribution of high-quality research artifacts).

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Jelena Mirkovic is Principal Scientist at USC-ISI and Research Associate Professor at USC. She received her MS and PhD from UCLA, and her BSc from University of Belgrade, Serbia. Jelena's research interests span networking and cybersecurity fields, as well as testbed experimentation. Her current research is focused on authentication, use of machine learning for network attack detection, large-scale dataset labeling for security, and user privacy. She is the lead PI on the SPHERE project.

Mr. David Balenson is Senior Supervising Computer Scientist and Associate Director of the Networking and Cybersecurity Division at USC-ISI. He received his MS and BS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. His current research interests include cybersecurity and privacy for critical infrastructure and cyber-physical systems including automotive and autonomous vehicles, experimentation and test, technology transition, and multidisciplinary research. He is the Community Outreach Director for SPHERE.