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

网络安全和隐私（CS P）威胁越来越多地影响我们的日常生活、国家基础设施和行业。最近有新闻价值的攻击针对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：新技术发布，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，防御者通常孤立地工作，使用私人数据和设施，并迅速被新的威胁所超越。为了将CS P研究转化为高度整合的社区范围的工作，CS P研究人员需要一个共同的、丰富的、有代表性的研究基础设施，以满足社区所有成员的需求，并促进可重复的科学。SPHERE研究基础设施将提供一种新颖的实验能力组合，专为CS P研究人员和教育工作者的需求量身定制。SPHERE提供的多样化、丰富的硬件基础设施、可配置的网络基底和安全的网络策略将支持新兴领域的新型CS P研究，如物联网、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。SPHERE的新型用户门户将使CS P研究的访问民主化，并将促进广大学生群体的实际CS P教育。SPHERE对代表性实验和再现性的新颖支持，与研究人员的紧密合作以及与人工制品评估委员会的紧密联盟，将使CS P科学的垂直进步。SPHERE研究基础设施将通过将社区的实验工作统一在一个共同的，丰富的，高度可用的基础设施上，将CS P研究从零碎的和机会主义的转变为高度集成的。综合研究工作将加快创新步伐，提高CS P研究产品的成功率和复杂性。因此，SPHERE将大大推进科学发现和国家在CS P的研究能力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.