Security and Privacy Heterogeneous Environment for Reproducible Experimentation
Outreach
NEWS
Read NSF news story about SPHERE and other Mid-Scale Infrastructure as well as ISI's announcement and NEU's announcement of the SPHERE award.
PRESENTATION & POSTER
Download our latest SPHERE presentation, poster(or opens in new tab), or SaTC poster.
PUBLICATIONS
HOW SHOULD I CITE SPHERE?
If you use SPHERE in your research and publish results based on that work, we would appreciate a citation to SPHERE. At present, the best reference is:
Jelena Mirkovic, David Balenson, Brian Kocoloski. Enabling Reproducibility through the SPHERE Research Infrastructure. USENIX ;login: Online, USENIX Association, December 16, 2024. https://www.usenix.org/publications/loginonline/enabling-reproducibility-through-sphere-research-infrastructure
@inproceedings{mirkovic2024enabling,
title={Enabling reproducibility through the {SPHERE} research infrastructure},
author={Mirkovic, J and Kocoloski, B and Balenson, D},
booktitle={Usenix ;login Magazine},
year={2024}
}
title={Enabling reproducibility through the {SPHERE} research infrastructure},
author={Mirkovic, J and Kocoloski, B and Balenson, D},
booktitle={Usenix ;login Magazine},
year={2024}
}
REPORT YOUR PUBLICATION: To help us document SPHERE’s impact, support discovery of SPHERE-enabled research, and report outcomes to our sponsors, we also invite authors to let us know about publications that used the SPHERE research infrastructure. If you have published a conference paper, journal article, technical report, thesis, or similar scholarly output that relied on SPHERE, please submit one publication per entry using the following form: https://forms.gle/1XHgsBGQViVJTyvE6.
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SPHERE USER PUBLICATIONS
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|---|---|---|
| Venue | Date | Citation |
| ACM SIGCOMM | August 2026 | Arvin Ghavidel, Pooria Namyar, Nikolai Matni, Walter Willinger, and Ramesh Govindan. 2026. Near-optimal Online Traffic Engineering. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2026 Conference (SIGCOMM '26). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1024–1045. https://doi.org/10.1145/3789240.3829123 |
| IEEE Access |
May 2026 | IEEE Access: V. S. P. Turaga et al., ACT: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding and Controlling Trustworthiness in Controllable AI, in IEEE Access, vol. 14, pp. 84016-84066, 2026, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3694817 |
| arXiv | May 2026 | Arvin Ghavidel, Pooria Namyar, Nikolai Matni, Walter Willinger, and Ramesh Govindan. 2026. Near-optimal Online Traffic Engineering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16187. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16187 |
| NDSS | February 2026 | Jie Kong, Damon James, Hemi Leibowitz, Ewa Syta and Amir Herzberg, CTng: Secure Certificate and Revocation Transparency, Networking and Distributed Systems Security Symposium (NDSS), 2026. |
| ACM SIGCOMM | 2025 | Pooria Namyar, Arvin Ghavidel, Mingyang Zhang, Harsha V. Madhyastha, Srivatsan Ravi, Chao Wang, and Ramesh Govindan. ZENITH: Towards A Formally Verified Highly-Available Control Plane. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference, 2025. doi: 10.1145/3718958.3750533 |
| TELFOR | 2025 | Ilija Bašičević, Milan Žeželj, Milos Jovanović, Filip Parag, Miroslav Popović and Mirko Sužnjević, Emulation of Slowloris Attack, 2025 33rd Telecommunications Forum (TELFOR), 2025, pp. 1-4, doi: 10.1109/TELFOR67910.2025.11314407. |
| Eurosys | 2025 | Pasindu Tennage, Shailesh Mishra, Alberto Sonnino, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic and Bryan Ford, Poster: ConsenStress: A Framework to Torture Test Consensus Protocols, Eurosys 2025. |
| IEEE S&P | May 2025 | Sam DeLaughter and Karen Sollins, SYN Proof-of- Work: Improving Volumetric DoS Resilience in TCP, 2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2025, pp. 1877-1890, doi: 10.1109/SP61157.2025.00166 |
| SPHERE USER DISSERTATION AND THESIS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Venue | Date | Citation |
| University of Minnesota Thesis | December 2025 | Eric Nieters, Improving and Evaluating the Effectiveness of Active Learning in Cybersecurity Pedagogy, University of Minnesota, 2025. |
| MIT Thesis | September 2025 | Chukwuemekalum Echezona, Proof-of-Work Based Mitigation of Real Time Video DDoS Attacks, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2025. |
| SPHERE TEAM PUBLICATIONS | ||
|---|---|---|
| Venue | Date | Citation |
| USENIX VehicleSec | August 2026 | Chandrima Ghatak, Christopher Tran, Rik Chatterjee, David Balenson, Jelena Mirkovic, and Jeremy Daily, Demo: SPHERE-CAN: Enabling Reproducible Automotive Network Security Experimentation, 2026 USENIX VehicleSec Conference, 2026. |
| ACSAC | December 2026 | J. Mirkovic, et al., Building SPHERE: A Public Research Infrastructure for Reproducible Cybersecurity Experimentation, To appear in 2026 IEEE Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2026. |
| ACM REP | July 2026 | Jelena Mirkovic, Qishen Sam Liang, and David Balenson, Measuring Ease of Reuse for Security Research Artifacts with Results-Reproduced Badges, To appear in Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Conference on Reproducibility and Replicability (ACM REP '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, doi: 10.1145/3820002.3828598. |
| MetaCRiSP | May 2026 | Jelena Mirkovic, David Balenson, Position Paper: Living Artifacts: Enabling Vertical Progress In Cybersecurity Research, 2026 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (SPW), San Francisco, CA, USA, 2026, pp. 293-299, doi: 10.1109/SPW72489.2026.00036. |
| ICCPS | May 2025 | Luis Garcia, Jelena Mirkovic, David Balenson, Erik Kline, Yuri Pradkin, David Choffnes, Daniel Dubois, Terry Benzel, Srivatsan Ravi, Joseph Barnes, Geoff Lawler, Chris Tran, and Alba Regalado, Poster: SPHERE CPS Enclave: A Reconfigurable Testbed for Industrial Control System Security Experimentation, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 16th International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems, 2025. |
| USENIX ;login: Online | December 2024 | Jelena Mirkovic, Brian Kocoloski, David Balenson, Enabling Reproducibility through the SPHERE Research Infrastructure,(opens in new tab) USENIX ;login: magazine, Dec. 2024. (opens in new tab) |
COMMUNITY OUTREACH EVENTS
Attend and interact with us at one of our planned community outreach events.
| Venue | Type of Outreach | Date | Location | Project Representative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACSAC 2026 | Networking | December 7-11, 2026 | Los Angeles, CA | David Balenson |
| LASER 2026 | Networking | December 8, 2026 | Los Angeles, CA | David Balenson |
| CSET 2026 | Networking | December 7, 2026 | Los Angeles, CA | David Balenson and Jelena Mirkovic |
| ACM CCS 2026 | Networking | November 15-19, 2026 | The Hague, The Netherlands | David Balenson |
| 2026 NSF Cybersecurity Summit | Networking, presentation, and tutorial | October 29-30, 2026 | Irvine, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| MERIF 2026 | Networking and presentation | September 27-29, 2026 | Washington, DC | Jelena Mirkovic, Alba Regaldo, Terry Benzel, and David Balenson |
| USENIX Security 2026 | Networking | August 12-14, 2026 | Baltimore, MD | David Balenson |
| VehicleSec 2026 | Networking and demo | August 10-11, 2026 | Baltimore, MD | David Balenson and Chandrima (Dimpy) Ghatak |
| 2026 NSF SaTC PI Meeting | Networking and breakout session | August 6-7, 2026 | College Park, MD | David Balenson |
| ACM REP 2026 | Networking and paper | July 20-22, 2026 | Delft, Netherlands | David Balenson |
| TCU CI Workshop 2026 | Networking and presentation | June 23-25, 2026 | Minneapolis, MN | Luis Garcia |
| MetaCRiSP 2026 | Networking and paper | May 21, 2026 | San Francisco, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| IEEE S&P 2026 | Networking | May 18-20, 2026 | San Francisco, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| NSF CICI PI Meeting 2026 | Keynote | May 11-12, 2026 | Los Angeles, CA | Jelena Mirkovic |
| NDSS 2026 | Networking and poster | February 23-27, 2026 | San Diego, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| NSF ACCESS 2026 | Networking and poster | January 22, 2026 | Los Angeles, CA | David Balenson |
| Venue | Type of Outreach | Date | Location | Project Representative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACSAC 2025 | Networking and poster | December 10-12, 2025 | Honolulu, HI | David Balenson |
| LASER 2025 | Networking and presentation | December 9, 2025 | Honolulu, HI | David Balenson |
| ICSS 2025 | Networking and panel | December 9, 2025 | Honolulu, HI | Jelena Mirkovic |
| CSET 2025 | Networking | December 8, 2025 | Honolulu, HI | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| EAI SmartSP 2025 | Networking and poster/demo | December 1-2, 2025 | Salt Lake City, UT | Luis Garcia (Utah) |
| NSF Cybersecurity Summit 2025 | Networking and poster | October 20-23, 2025 | Boulder, CO | David Balenson |
| ACM CCS 2025 | Networking | October 14-16, 2025 | Taipai, Taiwan | David Balenson |
| USENIX Security 2025 | Networking and poster | August 13-15, 2025 | Seattle, WA | David Balenson |
| ACM REP 2025 | Networking | July 29-31, 2025 | Vancouver, BC, Canada | David Balenson |
| IEEE S&P 2025 | Networking and poster | May 12-15, 2025 | San Francisco, CA | David Balenson |
| ICCPS 2025 | Networking and poster | May 6-9, 2025 | Irvine, CA | Luis Garcia (Utah) |
| CIRC PI Meeting 2025 | Networking and breakout sessions | March 10-11, 2025 | Raleigh, NC | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| NDSS 2025 | Networking and poster | February 24-28, 2025 | San Diego, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| Venue | Type of Outreach | Date | Location | Project Representative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACSAC 2024 | Networking and poster | December 9-13, 2024 | Waikiki, HI | David Balenson |
| NAIRR Software Workshop 2024 | Networking | December 3-4, 2024 | Chicago, IL | David Balenson |
| SC24 | Networking | November 19-21, 2024 | Atlanta, GA | Brian Kocoloski |
| Practical Reproducibility in HPC 2024 | Networking and workshop | November 18, 2024 | Atlanta, GA | Brian Kocoloski |
| Dagstuhl Seminar 24462 2024 | Networking and presentation | November 11-13, 2024 | Dagstuhl, Germany | Jelena Mirkovic and Terry Benzel |
| SACNAS NDiSTEM 2024 | Presentation | October 31 - November 2, 2024 | Phoenix, AZ | Jelena Mirkovic |
| ACM CCS 2024 | Networking and poster (abstract, poster) | October 14-18, 2024 | Salt Lake City, UT | David Balenson |
| NSF Cybersecurity Summit 2024 | Networking and panel | October 7-10, 2024 | Pittsburgh, PA | David Balenson |
| MERIF 2024 | Networking and presentation | September 25-27, 2024 | Kansas City, MO | Brian Kocoloski, David Balenson, and Alba Regalado |
| TAPIA 2024 | Presentation | September 18-20, 2024 | San Diego, CA | Jelena Mirkovic |
| SaTC PI Meeting 2024 | Networking, breakout session, poster, and tutorial | September 4-5, 2024 | Pittsburgh, PA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| USENIX Security 2024 | Networking and poster | August 14-16, 2024 | Philadelphia, PA | David Balenson |
| CSET 2024 | Networking | August 13, 2024 | Philadelphia, PA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| IEEE EuroS&P 2024 | Networking and poster | July 9-11, 2024 | Vienna, Austria | David Balenson |
| IEEE S&P 2024 | Networking and poster | May 20-23, 2024 | San Francisco, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| CICI PI Meeting 2024 | Networking and poster | March 28-29, 2024 | Tempe, AZ | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| NSF RIW 2024 | Networking and poster | March 26-29, 2024 | Tucson, AZ | David Balenson |
| FABRIC KNIT 8 Workshop 2024 | Networking and presentation | March 19-21, 2024 | San Diego, CA | Jelena Mirkovic |
| NDSS 2024 | Networking and poster | February 26-March 1, 2024 | San Diego, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| Venue | Type of Outreach | Date | Location | Project Representative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ACSAC 2023 | Networking and poster | December 4-8, 2023 | Austin, TX | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| ACM CCS 2023 | Networking | November 26-30, 2023 | Copenhagen, Denmark | David Balenson |
| NSF CIRC PI Meeting 2023 | Networking, poster, and panel | November 6-7, 2023 | Salt Lake City, UT | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
| NSF Cybersecurity Summit 2023 | Networking and poster | October 23-26, 2023 | Berkeley, CA | Jelena Mirkovic and David Balenson |
FUNDING OPPORTUNITIES
The SPHERE team welcomes requests for Letters of Collaboration. To expedite the process, please contact us by filling out the LoC Request Form.
| Name | Solicitation | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| CICI | NSF 25-531 | January 20, 2027 |
| SaTC 2.0 | NSF 25-515 | January 25, 2027 |
Expired Funding Opportunities
| Name | Solicitation | Deadline |
|---|---|---|
| CICI | NSF 25-531 | April 2, 2025 |
| CISE-MSI | NSF 24-536 | February 6, 2026 |
| SaTC | NSF 24-504 | Proposals accepted anytime |
| CIRC | NSF 23-589 | September 13, 2024 |
| CICI | NSF 23-517 | February 1, 2024 |