SPHERE Research Infrastructure

To meet researcher needs, USC Information Sciences Institute and Northeastern University have been funded by the NSF mid-scale research infrastructure program to build Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation (SPHERE). This research infrastructure will offer access to an unprecedented variety of hardware, software, and other resources, all relevant to cybersecurity and privacy research, connected by user-configurable network substrate, and protected by a set of security policies uniquely aligned with cybersecurity and privacy research needs. SPHERE will offer six user portals, closely aligned with needs of different user groups, facilitating widespread adoption. It will provide built-in support for reproducibility, via easy experiment packaging, sharing, and reuse. SPHERE will build a process, a standard, and incentives for community-wide efforts to develop representative experimentation environments for cybersecurity and privacy research, and to continuously contribute high-quality research artifacts.