The SPHERE team is excited to announce that our paper, “Building SPHERE: A Public Research Infrastructure for Reproducible Cybersecurity Experimentation,” has been accepted for presentation at the 42nd IEEE Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), taking place December 7–11, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. The paper will also be published in the conference proceedings.

ACSAC is a premier international forum for applied cybersecurity research and practice, bringing together researchers, practitioners, and experts from academia, industry, and government to share advances in computer and network security. We are delighted to have the opportunity to present SPHERE’s design, capabilities, progress, and lessons learned to this community.

Building Infrastructure for Reproducible Cybersecurity Research

The paper describes the motivation, design, construction, and early operation of SPHERE, the Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation, a public research infrastructure funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).

Cybersecurity research increasingly requires realistic experimentation involving diverse hardware, software, networks, and physical devices. Yet many researchers lack access to the specialized resources needed to conduct such experiments or reproduce and extend the work of others.

SPHERE addresses these challenges by bringing together heterogeneous computing and networking resources, industrial control systems (ICS), Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and specialized experimental environments within a common, remotely accessible infrastructure. Its capabilities also include configurable networking, secure experimentation, support for integrating external devices and testbeds, and services for sharing, evaluating, and reusing research artifacts.

The paper explains how SPHERE integrates these capabilities to support researchers, educators, students, and artifact evaluators. Its infrastructure was designed to accommodate experiments described in approximately 89% of 656 cybersecurity research papers surveyed from four leading security conferences.

From Design to Real-World Use

Importantly, the paper goes beyond describing SPHERE’s architecture. It documents our experiences building and operating a geographically distributed infrastructure while simultaneously supporting a growing community of users.

Since opening to beta users in January 2024, SPHERE has grown substantially. As reported in the paper, the infrastructure has:

• 449 registered research beta users and 680 registered class beta users
• 118 research projects and 57 class projects
• 176 research artifacts in its artifact library
• Supported cybersecurity research, education, and artifact evaluation at major security conferences

The paper also shares important lessons from SPHERE’s construction and early operations, including the need to manage research infrastructure as a production system from the outset, build robust monitoring and recovery mechanisms, and address the unique challenges of achieving reliable, reproducible experimentation with physical ICS and IoT devices.

These experiences offer insights for other research infrastructure projects and the broader cybersecurity community.

The paper is the result of a collaborative effort involving SPHERE team members from the USC Information Sciences Institute, Northeastern University, and the University of Utah. Its acceptance represents an important milestone for the project and recognition of the value of building shared, community-oriented infrastructure to advance cybersecurity research.

Join Us at ACSAC 2026 and Co-Located Workshops

We encourage researchers, educators, students, and cybersecurity practitioners to join us at ACSAC 2026 in Los Angeles!

The conference’s technical program takes place December 9–11, preceded by two days of co-located workshops on December 7–8. Several of these workshops align particularly closely with SPHERE’s mission of advancing rigorous, reproducible cybersecurity experimentation.

Two workshops of special interest are Cyber Security Experimentation and Test (CSET), on Monday, December 7, and Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER), on Tuesday, December 8.

Now in its 19th year, CSET brings together researchers and practitioners to explore cybersecurity experimentation methodologies, testing, evaluation, reproducibility, validity, and scalability. The workshop emphasizes rigorous scientific approaches and the development of shared community resources. SPHERE team members helping organize CSET include Terry Benzel (General Chair), Jelena Mirkovic (Webmaster), and David Balenson (Treasurer and ACSAC Liaison), alongside Program Co-Chairs Mohit Singhal of Northeastern University and Xiaojing Liao of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and other organizers.

LASER provides a highly interactive forum for examining the experimental methodologies, design decisions, challenges, successes, and failures behind cybersecurity research results. The workshop encourages deeper discussion of experimental practices and lessons learned, including insights that may not appear in traditional research papers. LASER is co-organized by SPHERE Community Outreach Director David Balenson and Eric Pauley of Virginia Tech.

Both workshops offer excellent opportunities to exchange ideas, learn from practical experiences, and explore ways to improve the scientific rigor and reproducibility of cybersecurity research. These are precisely the kinds of community discussions and collaborations that SPHERE was created to support.

Advancing Cybersecurity Research Together

We are proud to share SPHERE’s progress and experiences through our ACSAC 2026 paper and look forward to engaging with the cybersecurity community throughout the conference and workshops.

Whether you are conducting cybersecurity experiments, teaching hands-on security courses, evaluating research artifacts, or developing new experimental methodologies, we hope you’ll join us to exchange ideas and explore how SPHERE can support your work.

Registration for ACSAC 2026 is now open, with discounted early registration rates available through November 16.

We look forward to seeing you in Los Angeles!