Abstract

In October 2023, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation (SPHERE) project via its mid-scale research infrastructure program. SPHERE is a four-year long construction project to build a modern, versatile, and usable common research infrastructure to support cybersecurity and privacy research and education. Led by USC Information Sciences Institute (PIs Jelena Mirkovic and Brian Kocoloski) and Northeastern University (PI David Choffnes), SPHERE aims to transform cybersecurity and privacy research, enabling representative, sophisticated, and reproducible experimentation that allows researchers to build on the work of their peers, thus supercharging scientific progress. The infrastructure is partially complete and already in operation for beta users.
SPHERE also aims to provide usable infrastructure for various classes of users in cybersecurity and privacy areas: both novice and expert researchers, educators and students, investigators running human user studies, and artifact evaluation committees. SPHERE will further enable unprecedented access to hardware and software that is crucial to emerging cybersecurity and privacy fields, such as confidential computing, cyber-physical system security, IoT security and privacy, secure federated learning, etc.

Date

March 20, 2026

Authors

Jelena Mirkovic, Brian Kocoloski, David Balenson

Journal

Usenix