Research Infrastructure: Mid-scale RI-1 (M1:IP): SPHERE - Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation

网络安全和隐私威胁日益影响我们的日常生活、我们的国家基础设施和我们的行业。最近具有新闻价值的攻击目标是国家重要的基础设施、政府系统、研究人员和研究设施。需要保护的内容和威胁的演变情况：发布新技术，威胁参与者通过经验和密切合作提高自己的能力。与此同时，防御者经常在孤立的情况下工作，使用私人数据和设施，并提供很快被新威胁超越的防御措施。为了将CS&amp；P研究转变为高度集成的、社区范围的工作，CS&amp；P研究人员需要一个通用、丰富、具有代表性的研究基础设施，该基础设施能够满足社区所有成员的需求，并促进科学的可重现性。SPERE研究基础设施将提供一种新颖的实验能力组合，专为CS&amp；P研究人员和教育工作者的需求量身定做。SPHERE提供多样化、丰富的硬件基础设施、可配置的网络底层和安全的网络策略，这将支持物联网、网络物理系统、可编程网络、边缘计算、互联网测量和以人为本的CS&P等新兴领域的新型CS&P研究。SPHERE新颖的用户门户将使访问CS&P研究的途径民主化，并将促进广大学生群体的实用CS&P教育。SPERE对代表性实验和重现性的新颖支持、与研究人员的紧密合作以及与文物评估委员会的紧密联盟，将使CS&P科学取得垂直进步。SPERE研究基础设施将通过统一社区在通用、丰富、高度可用的基础设施上的实验努力，将CS&P研究从零碎和机会主义转变为高度集成。综合研究努力将加快创新步伐，提高CS&P研究产品的成功性和成熟度。因此，SPERE将显著促进科学发现和国家在CS&P方面的研究能力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Cybersecurity and privacy (CS&P) threats increasingly impact our daily lives, our national infrastructures and our industry. Recent newsworthy attacks targeted nationally important infrastructure, government systems, researchers, and research facilities. The landscape of what needs to be protected and from what threat evolves: new technologies are released and the threat actors improve their own capabilities through experience and close collaboration. Meanwhile, defenders work often in isolation, using private data and facilities, and producing defenses that are quickly outpaced by new threats. To transform CS&P research into a highly integrated, community-wide effort, CS&P researchers need a common, rich, representative research infrastructure, which meets the needs across all members of the community, and facilitates reproducible science.The SPHERE research infrastructure will offer a novel mix of experimentation capabilities, uniquely tailored to the needs of CS&P researchers and educators. SPHERE’s novel offering of diverse, rich hardware infrastructure, configurable network substrate and safe network policies will support novel CS&P research in emerging areas, such as IoT, cyber-physical systems, programmable networks, edge computing, Internet measurement and human-centric CS&P. SPHERE’s novel user portals will democratize access to CS&P research, and will facilitate practical CS&P education of broad student populations. SPHERE’s novel support for representative experimentation and reproducibility, tight collaboration with researchers and close alliances with artifact evaluation committees, will enable vertical progress in the science of CS&P. The SPHERE research infrastructure will transform CS&P research, from piecemeal and opportunistic to highly integrated, by unifying the community’s experimentation efforts on a common, rich, highly usable infrastructure. Integrated research efforts will increase the pace of innovation and improve the success and sophistication of CS&P research products. Thus, SPHERE will significantly advance scientific discovery and the Nation’s research capabilities in CS&P.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.