Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Frontiers (SaTC Frontiers)

In today’s increasingly networked, distributed, and asynchronous world, cybersecurity and privacy involve hardware, software, networks, data, people, and integration with the physical world. Society’s overwhelming reliance on this complex cyberspace, however, has exposed its fragility and vulnerabilities that defy existing cyber-defense measures; corporations, agencies, national infrastructure and individuals continue to suffer cyber-attacks. Achieving a truly secure cyberspace requires addressing both challenging scientific and engineering problems involving many components of a system, complex interactions among systems/components, and vulnerabilities that stem from human behaviors and choices. Examining the fundamentals of cybersecurity and privacy as a multidisciplinary subject can lead to fundamentally new ways to design, build and operate cyber systems, protect existing infrastructure, and motivate and educate individuals about cybersecurity and privacy.

The Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program welcomes proposals that address cybersecurity and privacy, and draw on expertise in one or more of these areas: computing, communication and information sciences; engineering; economics; education; mathematics; statistics; and social and behavioral sciences. Proposals that advance the field of cybersecurity and privacy within a single discipline or interdisciplinary efforts that span multiple disciplines are both encouraged. Please see the SaTC program solicitation (NSF 21-500, https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21500/nsf21500.htm ) for more details.

Through this solicitation—under the SaTC umbrella—NSF specifically seeks ambitious and potentially transformative center-scale projects in the area of cybersecurity and privacy that (1) catalyze far-reaching research explorations motivated by deep scientific questions or hard problems and/or by compelling applications and novel technologies that promise significant scientific and/or societal benefits, and (2) stimulate significant research and education outcomes that, through effective knowledge transfer mechanisms, promise scientific, economic and/or other societal benefits. The goal of the SaTC Frontiers program is to advance the frontiers of cybersecurity and privacy, and the areas listed in the SaTC program solicitation (NSF 21-500, https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2021/nsf21500/nsf21500.htm ) are meant to be illustrative but not exhaustive.

The SaTC Frontiers program will support proposals from $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 in total budget, with durations of up to five years.