Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure | 23 517

Opportunity Information: Apply for 23 517

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) program is a discretionary grant opportunity focused on improving the security and privacy of the cyberinfrastructure that modern science depends on. The core purpose is to strengthen the systems, platforms, and workflows used to store, move, and analyze scientific data, run large-scale computations, and support multi-institution collaborations. By funding cybersecurity work that is designed with research environments in mind, CICI aims to reduce risk to scientific operations while also enabling faster and more reliable discovery across many disciplines.

CICI is built around the idea that scientific cyberinfrastructure is not the same as typical enterprise IT. Research computing and data ecosystems tend to be highly distributed, data-intensive, and collaborative, often spanning campuses, national facilities, cloud services, and specialized instruments. They also move quickly, with workflows and tooling that evolve as research changes. The program therefore supports cybersecurity approaches that fit real scientific practice, including solutions that can be adopted without slowing research to a crawl, and that can scale across diverse communities and infrastructure types.

The solicitation organizes proposed work into three program areas. The first is Usable and Collaborative Security for Science (UCSS). Projects in this area emphasize security and usability research that makes it easier for scientists and research teams to collaborate securely. The intent is to produce approaches, tools, or integrations that fit naturally into scientific workflows, encourage routine adoption of good security practices, and help build more unified security environments across the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. In practice, this could include work that reduces friction in identity and access management for collaborations, improves secure data sharing, or embeds security checks into common research workflows in ways researchers will actually use.

The second area is Reference Scientific Security Datasets (RSSD). This track focuses on creating high-quality reference data resources for the security research community by leveraging instrumented cyberinfrastructure. Projects are expected to capture and curate metadata from scientific workflows and workloads so that the resulting datasets can serve as shared artifacts for reproducible security research, as well as for testing and evaluation of security methods. The emphasis on metadata and reference artifacts reflects a practical need in cybersecurity R and D: realistic, well-documented data that allows researchers to compare methods, reproduce results, and evaluate defenses in conditions that resemble real scientific computing environments.

The third area is Transition to Cyberinfrastructure Resilience (TCR). This track is oriented toward improving the robustness, integrity, trustworthiness, and resilience of scientific cyberinfrastructure through activities such as testing, evaluation, hardening, validation, and technology transition. Rather than stopping at a proof of concept, TCR encourages work that helps move novel cybersecurity research into deployment and operational use within research infrastructure. It also explicitly encourages transition activities that advance reproducibility in cyberinfrastructure, workflows, and data, recognizing that resilient science depends not only on security controls but also on the ability to reliably repeat, validate, and trust computational results and processes.

From an administrative standpoint, this is an NSF grant opportunity in the Science and Technology and other Research and Development category (CFDA 47.070). The funding opportunity number is 23-517, and the agency anticipated making around 20 awards. The listing shows an award ceiling of 0, which typically indicates that specific budget limits are not stated in that field and applicants should rely on the full solicitation and NSF guidance for budgeting expectations. The original closing date listed was February 17, 2023, and eligibility is described broadly as "Others" with clarification referenced in the solicitation's additional eligibility information.

Overall, CICI is designed to fund cybersecurity work that directly benefits the broader scientific community by securing data, computation, collaboration workflows, and the underlying infrastructure. It supports a pipeline that ranges from usable, collaboration-friendly security research (UCSS), to the creation of shared datasets that enable repeatable and comparable security evaluation (RSSD), to practical hardening and transition of research results into resilient, trustworthy cyberinfrastructure operations (TCR).

• The National Science Foundation in the science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 47.070.
• This funding opportunity was created on Nov 18, 2022.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Feb 17, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 20 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

Apply for 23 517

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