Collaborate
We look forward to collaborating with the cybersecurity and privacy research and education communities to inform our development of SPHERE and to help them learn about and adopt this new research infrastructure as part of their work.
Please take our brief and anonymous Needs Survey to tell us about your experimentation needs. Or you can contact us via our Contact page.
Reproducibility is a cornerstone of scientific progress, yet it remains a challenge in computer science—particularly in systems, networking, and cybersecurity/privacy research. By working together as a community, we have an opportunity to improve the reusability and transparency of research artifacts, making it easier for others to build on prior work.
The SPHERE research infrastructure aims to accelerate this progress by soliciting Representative Experimentation Environments (REEs) for integration into SPHERE. To support this effort, selected REE contributors will receive paid virtual internships to port their work to SPHERE, ensuring broader accessibility and long-term impact.
About SPHERE
SPHERE is an open-access research infrastructure designed to support cybersecurity and privacy experiments. It provides a testbed for deploying and evaluating experimental systems under realistic conditions, featuring diverse hardware to meet a wide range of research needs—covering nearly 90% of today’s cybersecurity and privacy publications. SPHERE’s resources include general and embedded compute nodes with trusted hardware, PLCs and IoT devices, programmable switches and NICs, and GPU-equipped nodes.
SPHERE aims to transform cybersecurity and privacy research into a highly integrated, community-wide effort by providing a common, rich, and representative research infrastructure. By porting Representative Experimentation Environments (REEs) to SPHERE, researchers can enhance reproducibility, reusability, and impact—ensuring their work benefits the broader research community.
What is an REE?
A Representative Experimentation Environment (REE) is a research artifact that enables realistic experimentation in a specific subfield of cybersecurity and privacy. “Representative” means realistic—capturing real-world conditions. Experimentation may occur entirely within a testbed or involve interaction with the Internet, real users, or both.
Examples of REEs:
- Code replicating an AS-level Internet topology for network security research.
- Measurement code for Internet censorship detection that can be run inside or outside a testbed.
- A survey instrument designed to study user privacy reasoning on social networks.
Eligible Submissions
To be eligible, an REE must:
- Relate to applied cybersecurity or privacy technologies.
- Consist of one or more of the following:
- Open-source software
- Open or reusable datasets
- User study materials (e.g., questionnaires, codebooks for qualitative analysis)
- Be part of previously published academic or industry research.
- Enable full reproduction of at least one set of results from the original publication.
- Have been reused (with or without modifications) in at least two publications by researchers other than the original author(s).
Submission Guidelines
Submit your REE via this form. To be considered for a Summer 2025 internship, submissions must be received by April 15, 2025.
Future Submission Opportunities: If you are unable to submit by this deadline, there will be additional submission opportunities, likely two and possibly more times per year.
Questions: If you have any questions or need additional information, please send email to apply [AT] sphere-project [DOT] net.
Selection Criteria
A review committee of SPHERE researchers will evaluate submissions based on:
- Expected benefits to SPHERE users.
- Timeliness and relevance of the REE.
- Ease of integration into SPHERE.
- Diversity of research areas supported by the REE.
Funding & Support
Authors of selected REEs will receive funding as virtual interns for up to three months (summer or academic year) to port their REEs to SPHERE.
- Stipend: $5,000/month (paid directly to interns).
- Support: Our team will provide day-to-day assistance in the porting process.
- Future Consideration: If not selected in this cycle, submissions may be considered for future cycles.
We look forward to your submissions and to strengthening reproducible research in cybersecurity and privacy!
SUMMER 2025 INTERNSHIP APPLICATIONS NOW CLOSED!
Thank you to all the students who applied for the SPHERE Summer 2025 internships! If you missed this opportunity, be sure to check back next year when we open applications for Summer 2026.
Do you run a shared research infrastructure that has unique cybersecurity needs, not amenable to off-the-shelf solutions? Reach out to us to connect with top researchers who can collaborate with you on SPHERE to design custom solutions that meet your needs.
Do you run a shared research infrastructure, used by cybersecurity and privacy researchers? Would you like your resources to become temporarily or permanently part of SPHERE? Reach out to us, we'd love to explore opportunities like this.
Let us help you learn how to use SPHERE as part of your work. Reach out with your questions, comments, and feature requests via our Contacts page.
Teaching cybersecurity or privacy? Please try our education modules. There are homework assignments for undergraduate and graduate classes, demonstrations for K-12 students, and capture-the-flag exercises. Reach out to us with questions via our Contacts page. We love to support education with SPHERE!
SPHERE is happy to support artifact evaluation for any conference that welcomes cybersecurity and privacy papers. SPHERE was used to support artifact evaluation for NDSS 2025 and will be used to support artifact evaluation for CCS 2025 and S&P 2026.
Guidelines for using SPHERE
Artifact evaluation committees (AECs) can use SPHERE to evaluate any artifact, even if it is unrelated to cybersecurity and privacy research.
There are three ways SPHERE can support AECs. AEC chairs should consider these and let us know which mode works best for their needs.
1. HotCRP integration
We have integrated SPHERE support into the HotCRP. You can install the code from https://github.com/STEELISI/hotcrp and follow the instructions from README. At most, one allocation per paper is allowed - the allocation may contain one or more resources (e.g., VMs), and they may be connected or not. All interaction with SPHERE is via the HotCRP interface. AE accounts are anonymous on SPHERE, even though they can be fully set up in the HotCRP.
2. SPHERE creates accounts for AEC chair
The AEC chair can ask artifact evaluators for their resource needs, collect them in a Google doc, and then share them with the SPHERE team. We will create the accounts, allocate the needed resources, and put the information into the document. The AE accounts are anonymous.
3. Artifact evaluators creates their own accounts
Artifact evaluators can create their own accounts on SPHERE. If they want to remain anonymous to the SPHERE team they can use the following fake information during account creation:
First name: <CONF NAME>
Last name: Evaluator
Username: <CONFNAME>XYZ (XYZ can be chosen by the evaluator so accounts are unique)
E-mail: <CONFNAME>[email protected]
For example an evaluator for NDSS 2025 could use the following information:
First name: NDSS2025
Last name: Evaluator
Username: ndss2025icecream
E-mail: [email protected]
Archiving evaluated artifacts
SPHERE aims to increase reproducibility of cybersecurity and privacy research. We would like to archive the artifacts that were successfully evaluated, so that they can be reused by other researchers on SPHERE. Please email [email protected] when an artifact is ready to be archived.