SPHERE previously partnered with Trusted CI during the 2024 Trusted CI Framework Cohort, where the SPHERE team adopted the Trusted CI Framework and completed a structured self-assessment of its cybersecurity program against the framework’s 16 Musts. The Musts identify the concrete, critical requirements for establishing and running a competent cybersecurity program. That cohort experience validated SPHERE’s foundational approach to security, while also highlighting an important next step: formally adopting a baseline cybersecurity control set and performing a gap analysis between that baseline and SPHERE’s existing controls. The Trusted CI Framework specifically recommends adoption of a recognized baseline control set in its Must 15.

Building on that groundwork, the February 2026 residency embedded Trusted CI staff directly with the SPHERE DevOps team for one intensive week at the USC Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, CA. Working side by side, the teams aligned SPHERE’s existing cybersecurity controls with the CIS Critical Security Controls (CIS Controls v8), which SPHERE has now formally adopted as its baseline control set.

This work focused on mapping SPHERE’s existing practices to the CIS Controls, identifying gaps, and prioritizing future improvements. The residency also strengthened SPHERE’s alignment with NSF’s evolving expectations for research security, including closer alignment with the NSF Research Infrastructure Guide (RIG) and its set of 14 critical controls. By grounding its program in both the Trusted CI Framework and the CIS Controls, SPHERE gained a common language for documenting controls, reduced reliance on ad hoc decision-making, and ensured consistency with broadly accepted community standards.

During the residency, Trusted CI conducted site visits at all the sites that host SPHERE physical infrastructure. They visited the ISI and USC server rooms, and met virtually with SPHERE co-PIs and their teams at Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the University of Utah Kahlert School of Computing. These discussions helped ensure that SPHERE’s distributed architecture is protected in a coordinated and consistent manner across institutions.

With the gap analysis complete, SPHERE is well positioned to prioritize future security investments as it moves toward full operations. The outcome directly supports SPHERE’s core mission of enabling realistic and reproducible experimentation without compromising trust in the facility or the science it supports. Achieving this mission requires protecting the underlying infrastructure from attack and security breaches, safeguarding the integrity and availability of shared resources, and ensuring strong isolation and protection of researcher experiments and data.

SPHERE will share lessons learned from the residency with the broader Trusted CI Research Infrastructure Security Community (RISC), contributing back to the ecosystem that helped shape its approach.

SPHERE (Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation) is an NSF Mid-scale Research Infrastructure-1 project (Award #2330066) spanning USC Information Sciences Institute, Northeastern University, and the University of Utah. SPHERE provides a public testbed for reproducible science and experimentation tailored to the needs of cybersecurity and privacy researchers and educators.

Trusted CI, the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, is supported by the National Science Foundation under Interagency Agreement #A2407-049-089-064206.0. Trusted CI’s mission is to enable trustworthy NSF science by partnering with cyberinfrastructure operators to build and maintain effective cybersecurity programs, publishing resources for the broader NSF community, and advancing the processes, tools, and knowledge needed to secure research progress.

The post SPHERE and Trusted CI Collaborate to Strengthen Research Security appeared first on SPHERE.

SPHERE was represented by Jelena Mirkovic, SPHERE Principal Investigator, and David Balenson, SPHERE Community Outreach Director. Their participation spanned the main conference as well as several co-located workshops, reflecting SPHERE’s ongoing commitment to community engagement, collaboration, and impact.

Technical Contributions and Workshops

Jelena and David actively contributed to multiple ACSAC co-located workshops:

• Industrial Control Systems Security (ICSS)

Jelena participated in a panel titled *Beyond Automation: How Secure Automation Empowers ICS Operators?* During the panel, she highlighted SPHERE’s cyber-physical systems enclave and discussed how it supports cybersecurity and privacy research and development for CPS and industrial control systems.

• Learning from Authoritative Security Experiment Results (LASER)

David organized the LASER workshop and delivered a talk on SPHERE, focusing on how the platform supports artifact evaluation, reproducible experimentation, and community-driven validation of security research results.

• Cyber Security Evaluation and Test (CSET)

Both Jelena and David helped organize CSET and served as session chairs, supporting discussions around rigorous evaluation and testing methodologies for cybersecurity systems and experiments.

ACSAC Poster and Conference Roles

As part of the main ACSAC program, David presented a poster on SPHERE during the poster session, providing attendees with an overview of SPHERE’s goals, capabilities, and opportunities for community use. The poster session offered valuable opportunities to engage directly with researchers and practitioners interested in reproducible cybersecurity and privacy experimentation.

In addition to his SPHERE-related activities, David played a broader role in ACSAC by moderating a panel on trust and assurance in AI systems, serving on a panel on cybersecurity research funding challenges, chairing a technical session, and serving as one of the key organizers of the conference. These roles further strengthened SPHERE’s visibility and connections within the applied security community.

Community Building and Sponsorship

SPHERE and USC Information Sciences Institute were proud sponsors of the prize giveaway during the ACSAC closing session. Together, they donated ISI tote bags, coffee mugs, and pens, along with SPHERE t-shirts and stickers. The giveaway helped close the conference on a high note while increasing awareness of SPHERE and ISI among attendees.

Advancing SPHERE’s Community Outreach Mission

Participation in ACSAC and its co-located workshops is a core component of SPHERE’s community outreach strategy. Through conferences like ACSAC, the SPHERE team works to promote awareness and adoption of the platform, engage with diverse research communities, and learn directly from researchers and practitioners about emerging needs and requirements. These interactions play a critical role in shaping SPHERE’s evolving capabilities and ensuring that the infrastructure continues to support impactful, real-world cybersecurity and privacy research.

We thank the ACSAC organizers, workshop chairs, and participants for a vibrant and productive conference, and we look forward to continuing these conversations with the community in future events.

The post SPHERE at ACSAC 2025 in Honolulu: Community Outreach, Engagement, and Impact appeared first on SPHERE.

Our article, “Cybersecurity Through Real-World Experimentation” (pages 34–35), highlights how SPHERE enables cutting-edge research by providing modular, real-world testbeds that replicate complex cyber systems.

“SPHERE’s flexible design and user-friendly tools ensure that everyone, from students to experts, can run meaningful, realistic experiments and easily share their results with the cybersecurity community”

We’re proud to see SPHERE included alongside pioneering work in AI, quantum computing, space exploration, and more.

Read the full magazine
Find us on pages 34–35.

The post SPHERE featured in the USC ISI 2024 Year in Review appeared first on SPHERE.

Your research could reach a wider audience while advancing reproducibility in our field. Selected REEs will become part of a community-wide infrastructure designed to support nearly 90% of today’s cybersecurity and privacy research needs.

What’s a REE? It’s a research artifact that enables realistic experimentation in cybersecurity or privacy research—like code replicating network topologies, censorship detection tools, or privacy survey instruments.

Eligible REEs are open-source artifacts from published cybersecurity and privacy research that can reproduce original results and have demonstrated value through reuse by other researchers.

Deadline: April 15, 2025

Visit CALL FOR REES for complete details on eligibility, benefits, and how to apply.

We look forward to your submissions and to strengthening reproducible research in cybersecurity and privacy!
*The image was generated with the assistance of DALL-E 3.

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Principal Investigator, Jelena Mirkovic, and Community Outreach Director, David Balenson, will attend NDSS to learn about community research infrastructure needs and share how SPHERE can support the community’s research.

Jelena and David will present a poster during the poster session on Tuesday, February 25 from 5-7 pm. The poster describes SPHERE’s architecture and capabilities, how to collaborate with us, and current status.

SPHERE enables reproducible cybersecurity experimentation that accelerates scientific progress. It is designed to support cybersecurity and privacy research such as studying ICS security in a realistic environment, studying IoT behavior and privacy implications, enhancing network attack detection and mitigation with AI, and evaluation at different levels of fidelity.

Learn more about NDSS 2025: https://ndss-symposium.org

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Our article is one of five recently announced by USENIX, covering topics such as security research infrastructure, site reliability engineering (SRE), effective use of non-volatile memory (NVM), and quantum computing.

The article details how the NSF-funded SPHERE research infrastructure advances cybersecurity and privacy research by enabling reproducible, sophisticated experiments, fostering peer review, and accelerating scientific progress. It was authored by Jelena Mirkovic, Brian Kocoloski, and David Balenson from USC-ISI and was shepherded by ;login: editor Rik Farrow.

The article explores the motivation behind SPHERE, its architecture, key components and services, and its impact on researchers and educators. By providing a shared, well-supported research infrastructure, SPHERE streamlines experimentation, enhances collaboration, and enables faster progress across the cybersecurity community.

“In the age of cloud apps, having infrastructure that supports security research is more important than ever,” said Rik Farrow. “SPHERE provides arrays of networked devices, embedded systems, and IoT devices that would be difficult for researchers to come by—and even harder for those seeking to verify research results.”

“We’re grateful for the opportunity to share our work with the USENIX community,” said David Balenson, SPHERE’s Community Outreach Director.

Read the full article on the USENIX website: Enabling Reproducibility through the SPHERE Research Infrastructure.

SPHERE is currently open to beta users at https://sphere-testbed.net. Visit the SPHERE project page for the latest updates, collaboration opportunities, and future development plans.

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This year, we will host specialized workshops on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), and binary analysis to support the research community. Additionally, we’re doubling participation in our summer internship program, offering more opportunities for students passionate about cybersecurity and privacy research.

We look forward to a productive year collaborating with the cybersecurity and privacy community, addressing research needs, and advancing the use of SPHERE research infrastructure to drive scientific innovation.

Here’s to a successful 2025!

The post Happy New Year from the SPHERE Project Team appeared first on SPHERE.

“For the last decade, Jelena Mirkovic, USC Viterbi research associate professor of computer science, has studied the memorability and security of passwords, and the ways in which these two are often at odds. Mirkovic likes five-to-seven-word passwords or phrases — she is fond of writing poetry — often mixing languages like English and her native Serbian.”

As our project leader at SPHERE (Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation), Dr. Mirkovic guides our mission to transform cybersecurity and privacy research. Under her direction, we’re building infrastructure that empowers researchers to conduct sophisticated, reproducible experiments and build upon each other’s work.

Beyond leading SPHERE, Dr. Mirkovic brings extensive expertise to USC/ISI as a Principal Scientist and to USC’s School of Advanced Computing as a research associate professor. Her groundbreaking research spans denial-of-service attacks, vulnerability scanning, and user-centric security and privacy.

We’re incredibly fortunate to have such an inspiring leader guiding SPHERE’s vision for the future of cybersecurity research!

The post USC Viterbi Magazine Spotlights SPHERE Principal Investigator Jelena Mirkovic appeared first on SPHERE.

SPHERE, FABRIC, and Chameleon Cloud each offer unique capabilities for researchers: SPHERE focuses on cybersecurity and privacy experimentation, FABRIC provides distributed infrastructure for networking and computing research, and Chameleon Cloud offers a reconfigurable platform for systems research.

At the conference, attendees had the opportunity to learn about these powerful research platforms and even test-drive experiments on each testbed. This collaboration highlights our shared commitment to making advanced computing infrastructure more accessible and building a more inclusive tech future together!

The post SPHERE at SACNAS NDiSTEM Conference appeared first on SPHERE.

We were delighted to see our advisory board member, Dr. Patrick Traynor, at the conference. Dr. Traynor, who co-directs the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity (FICS) Research at the University of Florida, continues to provide valuable guidance to SPHERE through his extensive expertise in cybersecurity and his proven track record of transforming research into real-world solutions.

The conference provided valuable opportunities to engage with researchers and discuss how SPHERE can support their cybersecurity experimentation needs. The enthusiastic response from attendees reinforces the growing demand for robust, reproducible cybersecurity research infrastructure.

We extend our gratitude to everyone who visited our poster and engaged in discussions about SPHERE’s capabilities. These conversations have laid the groundwork for exciting future collaborations in advancing cybersecurity research.

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