Please take our brief and anonymous Needs Survey to tell us about your experimentation needs.  Or you can contact us via our Contact page.

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific progress, yet it remains a challenge in computer science—particularly in systems, networking, cybersecurity, and privacy research. By working together as a community, we have an opportunity to improve the reusability and transparency of research artifacts, making it easier for others to build on prior work. 

The SPHERE research infrastructure aims to accelerate this progress by soliciting research artifacts for integration into SPHERE. To support this effort, selected research artifact contributors will receive paid virtual internships to port their work to SPHERE, ensuring broader accessibility and long-term impact. In addition, SPHERE may hire virtual interns to port existing research artifacts that are already selected for integration, even if the intern is not the original author.

Eligible Submissions

To be eligible, a virtual intern must:

• Relate to applied cybersecurity or privacy technologies.
• Consist of one or more of the following:
  • Open-source software
  • Open or reusable datasets
  • User study materials (e.g., questionnaires, codebooks for qualitative analysis)
• Be part of previously published academic or industry research.
• Enable full reproduction of at least one set of results from the original publication.
• Have been reused (with or without modifications) in at least two publications by researchers other than the original author(s) or demonstrate strong potential for reuse.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis throughout the year. 

Applicants may indicate their preferred start term (spring, summer, or fall). 

Additional application details will be shared later this year.

Questions: If you have any questions or need additional information, please send email to apply [AT] sphere-project [DOT] net.

Selection Criteria

A review committee of SPHERE researchers will evaluate submissions based on:

• Expected benefits to SPHERE users.
• Ease of integration into SPHERE.

Funding & Support

Students porting their own REEs or existing REEs to SPHERE will receive funding as virtual interns for up to three months (summer or academic year).

• Stipend: $5,000/month (paid directly to interns).
• Support: Our team will provide day-to-day assistance in the porting process.

We look forward to your submissions and to strengthening reproducible research in cybersecurity and privacy!

SPHERE offers in-person internships at USC Information Sciences Institute (Los Angeles), Northeastern University (Boston), and the University of Utah (Salt Lake City) for undergraduate and graduate students seeking a hands-on blend of research and development experience. Interns work closely with researchers and engineers on real systems, tools, and infrastructure that support cutting-edge research in systems, networking, and cybersecurity and privacy.

Internships are eight weeks long program. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Additional application details will be shared later this year. Questions may be sent to apply [AT] sphere-project [DOT] net.

• SPHERE Infrastructure Internship @ USC-ISI in Los Angeles, CA
• SPHERE CPS Internship @ U. Utah in Salt Lake City, UT
• SPHERE IoT Internship @ Northeasten U. in Boston, MA

Do you run a shared research infrastructure that has unique cybersecurity needs, not amenable to off-the-shelf solutions? Reach out to us to connect with top researchers who can collaborate with you on SPHERE to design custom solutions that meet your needs.

Do you run a shared research infrastructure, used by cybersecurity and privacy researchers? Would you like your resources to become temporarily or permanently part of SPHERE? Reach out to us, we'd love to explore opportunities like this.

Let us help you learn how to use SPHERE as part of your work. Reach out with your questions, comments, and feature requests via our Contacts page.

Teaching cybersecurity or privacy? Please try our education modules. There are homework assignments for undergraduate and graduate classes, demonstrations for K-12 students, and capture-the-flag exercises. Reach out to us with questions via our Contacts page. We love to support education with SPHERE!

SPHERE is happy to support artifact evaluation for any conference that welcomes cybersecurity and privacy papers. SPHERE was used to support artifact evaluation for NDSS 2025 and will be used to support artifact evaluation for CCS 2025 and S&P 2026.

Guidelines for using SPHERE

Artifact evaluation committees (AECs) can use SPHERE to evaluate any artifact, even if it is unrelated to cybersecurity and privacy research.

There are three ways SPHERE can support AECs. AEC chairs should consider these and let us know which mode works best for their needs.

1. HotCRP integration

We have integrated SPHERE support into the HotCRP. You can install the code from https://github.com/STEELISI/hotcrp and follow the instructions from README. At most, one allocation per paper is allowed - the allocation may contain one or more resources (e.g., VMs), and they may be connected or not. All interaction with SPHERE is via the HotCRP interface. AE accounts are anonymous on SPHERE, even though they can be fully set up in the HotCRP.

2. SPHERE creates accounts for AEC chair

The AEC chair can ask artifact evaluators for their resource needs, collect them in a Google doc, and then share them with the SPHERE team. We will create the  accounts, allocate the needed resources, and put the information into the document. The AE accounts are anonymous.

3. Artifact evaluators creates their own accounts

Artifact evaluators can create their own accounts on SPHERE. If they want to remain anonymous to the SPHERE team they can use the following fake information during account creation:

First name: <CONF NAME>
Last name: Evaluator
Username: <CONFNAME>XYZ  (XYZ can be chosen by the evaluator so accounts are unique)
E-mail: <CONFNAME>[email protected]

For example an evaluator for NDSS 2025 could use the following information:

First name: NDSS2025
Last name: Evaluator
Username: ndss2025icecream
E-mail: [email protected] 

Archiving evaluated artifacts

SPHERE aims to increase reproducibility of cybersecurity and privacy research. We would like to archive the artifacts that were successfully evaluated, so that they can be reused by other researchers on SPHERE. Please email [email protected] when an artifact is ready to be archived.