Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure | 25 531

Opportunity Information: Apply for 25 531

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure (CICI) program is a discretionary grant opportunity focused on strengthening the security and privacy of the cyberinfrastructure that underpins modern scientific research. The core aim is to advance scientific discovery by funding work that makes research computing environments, data systems, and collaboration platforms safer and more trustworthy. CICI is built around the reality that today s science is highly distributed, data intensive, fast moving, and collaborative, often spanning multiple institutions, tools, and disciplines. Because of that complexity, the program emphasizes solutions that can fit into real scientific workflows rather than security approaches that only work in isolated or idealized settings.

CICI supports projects that develop, deploy, and integrate cybersecurity capabilities that benefit the broader research community. In practical terms, that means improving protections for scientific data, computation, shared workflows, collaborative research processes, and the infrastructure that connects them. The program is looking for work that can scale across different scientific domains and that recognizes the varied needs of researchers, operators, and cyberinfrastructure projects. It also places value on approaches that improve reproducibility and confidence in research outcomes, especially as science increasingly depends on complex pipelines and AI driven analysis.

NSF is soliciting proposals across four distinct program areas. The first area, Usable and Collaborative Security for Science (UCSS), targets security methods that people will actually adopt in day to day research. Projects here should combine security with usability and collaboration needs, helping security become a natural part of scientific workflows rather than an added burden. The emphasis is on integrated environments that support end to end collaboration across the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem, including tools, platforms, and shared services researchers rely on.

The second area, Reference Scientific Security Datasets (RSSD), focuses on building high quality data resources for security research in scientific settings. Projects are expected to use instrumented cyberinfrastructure to capture metadata from real scientific workflows and workloads, then curate those captures into reference datasets. The goal is to enable reproducible cybersecurity research, along with more rigorous testing and evaluation, by providing realistic artifacts that represent the kinds of behaviors and conditions found in research computing environments.

The third area, Transition to Cyberinfrastructure Resilience (TCR), is aimed at moving promising cybersecurity ideas toward practical, resilient deployment in real systems. Projects in this area should strengthen the robustness, integrity, trustworthiness, and resilience of scientific cyberinfrastructure through activities like validation, hardening, testing, evaluation, and technology transition. TCR also encourages work that improves how reproducibility is deployed and used across cyberinfrastructure, workflows, and data, reflecting NSF s interest in making scientific systems more dependable and verifiable in practice, not just in theory.

The fourth area, Integrity, Provenance, and Authenticity for Artificial Intelligence Ready Data (IPAAI), addresses growing concerns about the trustworthiness of datasets used in AI enabled science. Projects should improve confidence and reproducibility in AI produced scientific results by strengthening integrity protections, establishing clearer provenance, and improving authenticity mechanisms for scientific datasets that feed AI systems. This area recognizes that AI outcomes are only as reliable as the data and processes behind them, and it seeks approaches that make AI ready data more traceable, verifiable, and resistant to tampering or uncertainty.

Eligibility is limited to U.S. based institutions of higher education (including two year and four year accredited colleges and universities, such as community colleges) and certain non profit, non academic organizations directly associated with education or research activities, such as independent museums, observatories, research laboratories, and professional societies. If a proposal includes funding or work performed at an international branch campus of a U.S. institution (including via subawards or consultants), the proposal must clearly explain the benefits of performing that work at the international site and why the activities cannot be performed at the U.S. campus.

Administrative details include an opportunity number of 25 531 under CFDA 47.070, offered by NSF as a grant in the Science and Technology and other Research and Development category. The original closing date is 2025 04 02. The award ceiling is 1,200,000 dollars, and NSF expects to make about 20 awards. Overall, CICI is positioned as a program for teams that can deliver cybersecurity advances tightly aligned with the realities of scientific cyberinfrastructure, with a strong preference for solutions that are usable, reproducible, and capable of broad community impact.

• 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 2025-01-04.
• Applicants must submit their applications by 2025-04-02. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $1,200,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 20 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others.

Apply for 25 531

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