Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure
This grant supports projects that improve cybersecurity for scientific research infrastructure, focusing on usability, data, resilience, and AI data integrity.
Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation
Due Dates: April 2, 2025 | January 21, 2026 | January 20, 2027
Funding Amounts: Typical awards: $600,000–$1,200,000 total for up to 3 years; total program funding up to $12,000,000; ~12–20 awards expected
Summary: Supports research to enhance the security, privacy, and resilience of scientific cyberinfrastructure, with four targeted program areas including AI data integrity and collaborative security.
Key Information: No cost sharing required; proposals limited to two per individual as PI/co-PI/senior personnel.
Description
The Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) program aims to advance scientific discovery and innovation by improving the security and privacy of cyberinfrastructure supporting science. The program encourages the development, deployment, and integration of cybersecurity solutions that benefit the broader scientific community by securing data, computation, workflows, and infrastructure. CICI recognizes the complexity and diversity of modern, distributed, and collaborative science environments, and seeks applied research proposals that address the unique challenges of securing scientific cyberinfrastructure.
Proposals are solicited in four program areas:
- Usable and Collaborative Security for Science (UCSS): Research to develop and deploy security and usability solutions that facilitate scientific collaboration and integrate security into scientific workflows.
- Reference Scientific Security Datasets (RSSD): Projects to collect, curate, and share datasets from scientific workflows to support reproducible cybersecurity research and evaluation.
- Transition to Cyberinfrastructure Resilience (TCR): Efforts to improve the robustness, trustworthiness, and resilience of scientific cyberinfrastructure through the transition and operational deployment of novel cybersecurity research.
- Integrity, Provenance, and Authenticity for Artificial Intelligence Ready Data (IPAAI): Projects to enhance the integrity, provenance, and authenticity of datasets used in AI-driven scientific research, improving confidence and reproducibility in AI-produced results.
All proposals must clearly articulate the scientific infrastructure and communities to benefit from the research, address ethical considerations, and provide sustainability plans. Awardees must make datasets and software outputs publicly available, adhering to FAIR data principles.
