Registration now open: 2025 NSF Cybersecurity Summit – October 20–23 in Boulder, CO

We’re excited to announce that registration is now open for the 2025 NSF Cybersecurity Summit, taking place October 20–23, 2025, at the UCAR Center Green Campus and NSF NCAR in Boulder, Colorado.

This annual Summit brings together cybersecurity practitioners, technical leaders, and risk managers from the NSF Major Facilities and Cyberinfrastructure community. Attendees will also include key stakeholders and thought leaders from across the scientific and cybersecurity landscapes.

🔹 Explore the 2025 Program
Check out this year’s engaging sessions and speakers.

🔹 Register to Attend
Please complete your registration by October 6, 2025.

🔹 Plan Your Stay
Trusted CI has secured hotel accommodations for Summit attendees.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Please send an email to summit@trustedci.org

We look forward to seeing you in Boulder this October!

Trusted CI Webinar: Securing Medical Imaging AI Models Against Adversarial Attacks, Monday August 25th @ 10am Central

University of Pittsburgh's Shandong Wu is presenting the talk, Securing Medical Imaging AI Models Against Adversarial Attacks, on Monday August 25th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

While AI is increasingly present in clinical practice especially for medical imaging, it is imminent to ensure cybersecurity of imaging diagnostic AI models. Newly advanced adversarial attacks pose a threat to the safety of medical AI models, but little is known about the characteristics of this threat. Medical adversarial attacks may lead to serious consequences including patient harm, liability of healthcare providers, and other ethical issues or crimes. It is imperative to study this cybersecurity issue to mitigate potential negative consequences and to ensure safety of health care. In this talk, the speaker will discuss cyber vulnerabilities of deep learning-based medical imaging diagnosis models under adversarial attacks, show real-world experiments on how adversarial attacks can fool AI models to decrease diagnosis performance and to confuse experienced radiologists, and present several methods of defending adversarial attacks to secure AI models in medical imaging applications.

Speaker Bio: 

Shandong Wu, PhD, is a Professor in Radiology, Biomedical Informatics, Bioengineering, and Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Wu leads the Intelligent Computing for Clinical Imaging (ICCI) lab, and he is the founding director of the Pittsburgh Center for AI Innovation in Medical Imaging. Dr. Wu’s work focuses on developing trustworthy medical imaging AI for clinical/translational applications. Dr. Wu's lab received multiple research awards such as the RSNA Trainee Research Award twice in 2017 and 2019, the 2021 AANS Natus Resident/Fellow Award for Traumatic Brain Injury, the 2025 SPIE Imaging Informatics Best Paper Award, etc. Dr. Wu’s research is supported by NIH, NSF, multiple research foundations, Amazon AWS, Nvidia, and many institutional funding sources. Dr. Wu has published > 190 journal papers and conference papers/abstracts in both the computing and clinical fields. His research has been featured in hundreds of scientific news reports and media outlets in the world. 

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Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events. To submit topics or requests to present, see our call for presentations. Archived presentations are available on our site under "Past Events."

Trusted CI visits IceCube

Trusted CI staff member Megha Moncy holding one of the many hard drives shipped back from the South Pole containing neutrino research data

 

"Have you ever held $300,000 in your hands?" At least that's the way Steve Barnet put it as he allowed us to hold one of the hard drives that had been shipped back from the main IceCube Neutrino detector in Antarctica. Steve is the IT manager for the IceCube Neutrino Detector, which is an NSF Major Facility allowing scientists from around the globe to study neutrinos. Steve estimates that each drive shipped back has around $300,000 worth of scientific data on it, based on the cost of collecting the data.

In June 2025, members of the Trusted CI team took the opportunity to tour the IceCube Neutrino Detector data center and development facility at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The team learned about the custom designed sensors and equipment that make up the 1 cubic kilometer detector buried under 1.5 km of ice at the South Pole.
Because the detector produces about 1TB per day of data, and satellite communication to the South Pole is limited, it's still far more efficient to ship hard drives back to the lab after a season of data collection at the detector is finished. However, because the data is so valuable, they write the data to at least two separate arrays of hard drives and ship them on separate logistical channels in case of catastrophe during shipment.

Steve Barnet (right), giving a tour of the IceCube development facility.

The IceCube data center in Madison also simulates the layout of the facility in Antarctica so that they can better plan any changes made to the infrastructure and to be sure that equipment that is shipped down to the South Pole facility will fit around corners, be compatible with installed equipment, and have enough power.

The IceCube sensors, which are called "digital optical modules", are about the size of a basketball but surprisingly weigh more than a bowling ball. Most of the weight is owed to the thick glass in each sensor pod that shields the sensitive electronics and photomultipliers from the 1 to 2 kilometers of ice that sit above them. The unique sensors were designed and built by several institutions within the international IceCube Collaboration to withstand the extreme environment of Antarctica. 

Trusted CI staff member Mark Krenz holding one of the digital optical modules.

Neutrinos are a fundamental particle generated by the universe's most extreme events such as supernovae and black holes. They travel in straight lines from their origin through the universe, passing through ordinary matter. As neutrinos pass through the Earth from all directions, including through the core of the planet, neutrinos whose path takes them through the south pole IceCube detector pass through the large cubic kilometer of ice making up the array. Most of them pass right through the detector without any interaction, but occasionally they hit an atom in the ice and generate secondary charged particles which travel through the ice faster than light travels through ice. This produces Cherenkov radiation, which creates a blue flash of light. This blue light phenomenon of Cherenkov radiation is what the photomultipliers actually detect.

 

IceCube's testing and development array of sensors.

The facility also has a test array of sensors that are not encased in glass and stacked closely together that allow IceCube staff to run tests and diagnostics on the electronics before performing the same operations on the production sensor array. This reduces the chance of an incident that damages the entire array, "which would be bad", according to Steve (he likes understatement). Availability is a crucial security requirement for the IceCube array, and one of the threats against the sensors continuing to function is the extreme cold damaging the electronics inside. If the array loses electricity, it would only be a matter of a day or so before large parts of the array would become unrecoverable. Thus, it is important that a generator powering the array in Antarctica run continuously uninterrupted over the lifetime of the experiment. Trusted CI benefits from visiting the IceCube facility by seeing the equipment and better understanding the processes used to program, deploy, and protect the equipment from a variety of security threats. 

Trusted CI Webinar: TIPPSS to improve Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security for Cyberphysical Systems, Monday July 28th @ 10am Central

Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub's Florence Hudson is presenting the talk, TIPPSS to improve Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security for Cyberphysical Systems, on Monday July 28th at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

The challenge of providing end to end trust and security for operational technology systems has been a growing challenge and increasingly imperative. An IEEE effort was begun in 2016 to tackle that challenge, resulting in the publication of the first IEEE/UL TIPPSS standard (IEEE/UL 2933-2024) and the awarding of the 2024 IEEE Standards Association Emerging Technology Award to the TIPPSS standard working group.  The goal of the TIPPSS standard, which is envisioned to be a family of standards, is to improve Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security (TIPPSS) for cyber-physical systems, beginning with Clinical Internet of Things and expanding to research infrastructure, the energy grid, distributed energy resources, and more. In this webinar we will discuss the initial IEEE/UL TIPPSS standard for clinical IoT data and device interoperability, the details of the technical and process elements of the standard, and the opportunity to apply it to all operational technology. Future TIPPSS presentations planned include "TIPPSS for navigating a changing cybersecurity landscape at the Electron-Ion Collider and other scientific research facilities" in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory at the ICALEPS 2025 conference (The 20th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems) September 20-26, 2025 in Chicago, bringing the TIPPSS discussion to research infrastructure and the IT systems that support it. Trusted CI's initiatives in Secure by Design and the Trusted CI Operational Technology Procurement Vendor Matrix are very complementary to the TIPPSS initiative, and there is more we can do as a community in this effort together. Join us to discuss the imperatives and possibilities.

Speaker Bio: 

Florence Hudson is Executive Director of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub at Columbia University, leading over $10M in projects funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Transportation. She is also Founder & CEO of FDHint, LLC, a global advanced technology consulting firm. A former IBM Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Internet2 Senior Vice President & Chief Innovation Officer, Special Advisor for the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, and aerospace engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and Grumman Aerospace Corporation, she is an Editor in Chief and Author for Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, IEEE, and other publications. She leads the development of global IEEE/UL standards to increase Trust, Identity, Privacy, Protection, Safety and Security (TIPPSS) for connected healthcare data and devices and cyberphysical systems, and is Vice Chair of the IEEE Engineering Medicine & Biology Society Standards Committee. She earned her Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering degree from Princeton University, and executive education certificates from Harvard Business School and Columbia University.

IEEE Emerging Technology Award

IEEE 2933 Working Group Leadership Team

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Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events. To submit topics or requests to present, see our call for presentations. Archived presentations are available on our site under "Past Events."

Applications are now open for the 2025 Trusted CI Fellowship!

We’re excited to announce that applications are now open for the 2025 Trusted CI Fellowship. This is your chance to receive expert training, work closely with Trusted CI members, and further empower the NSF community to secure its own research.

Click here to learn more about the Fellows program and to view our past Fellows

Click here to apply for the program

The application deadline is Thursday, July 31, 2025

Trusted CI’s past Fellows have been an amazing success with 35 Fellows from various fields, including:

Research Technologies
Astrophysics
Criminal Justice
Network and Combinatorial Optimization
and Computer Engineering

Fellowship Benefits:

• Participation in Virtual Cybersecurity Institute Training Workshops
• Receive funding to attend the 2025 NSF Cybersecurity Summit
• Access to Trusted CI staff and other Cybersecurity professionals

Participation in the Fellows program will occur from October 2025 to April 2026.

Now Open - 2025 NSF Cybersecurity Summit Call for Participation

 

It is our pleasure to announce that the 2025 NSF Cybersecurity Summit (Oct 20-23, Boulder) Call for Participation is now open! The Summit Program Committee seeks proposals for:

• Plenary presentations and Panel talks
• Workshops and Trainings
• Birds of a Feather (BoFs) and Project meetings
• Poster session
• TLP:RED talks 

We welcome your proposals relevant to a broad range of topics related to the operational cybersecurity of NSF cyberinfrastructure and programs.  However, we encourage proposals that address topics highly ranked by the NSF CI Community. These include: 

• HPC security
• AI in cybersecurity:  Practical use in operational security and/or  balancing automation and oversight
• Network security and defense
• Regulatory compliance
• Staying on top of emerging threats (how-to guide)
• Pros and cons of federal, academic, and private research funding
• Digital forensics and incident response (case studies)
• Zero-trust architecture implementation
• Security of research IOT
• Adjusting your cybersecurity program during cuts

More detail and guidance on submitting proposals can be found here:
https://www.trustedci.org/2025-cfp

The deadline for plenary, workshop, training, BoF, and project meeting submissions is Monday June 30th. 

Poster session submissions are due September 5th. TLP: RED submissions are due October 10th. 

Thank you on behalf of the Program and Organizing Committees. We look forward to receiving your proposals and hope to see you in October in Boulder!

Trusted CI Webinar: Towards Practical Confidential High-Performance Computing, Monday June 23rd @ 10am Central

Indiana University's Chenghong Wang is presenting the talk, Towards Practical Confidential High-Performance Computing, on Monday June 23rd at 10am, Central time.

Please register here.

The democratization of high-performance computing (HPC)—driven by a paradigm shift toward cloud-based solutions—has unlocked unprecedented scalability in data sharing, interdisciplinary collaboration, and large-scale analytics. Yet, despite these advancements, the lack of strong privacy protection mechanisms, particularly for sensitive or regulated data, remains a significant barrier preventing critical domains from fully leveraging cloud HPC. In this webinar, I will present our group’s research toward enabling a practical confidential HPC paradigm—one that empowers HPC providers to securely process sensitive workloads with provable security and privacy guarantees.
 

My talk will be structured around three key pillars that underpin our approach: practical data-in-use security, data governance and compliance, and usability. First, I will introduce our vision for a next-generation trusted execution environment (TEE) architecture tailored for HPC—designed to deliver HPC-grade efficiency for large-scale, parallel workloads, while upholding strict data-in-use security guarantees. Second, I will discuss how we leverage formal methods to validate compliance with complex governance and data-sharing policies—ensuring that even dynamic, multi-party workloads can remain policy-aligned. Finally, I will share our ongoing work in developing new usability frameworks and programming abstractions designed to make confidential computing accessible to domain scientists—lowering the barrier for adoption without requiring expertise in cryptography or secure systems.

Speaker Bio: 

Chenghong Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. He is a core faculty member of the Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SPICE) group and affiliated with the NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC). His research focuses on building full-stack solutions for privacy-preserving data sharing and analytics (PPDSA), bridging theory, systems, and architectural design. His work spans trusted execution environments, differential privacy, applied cryptography, and secure data systems. Dr. Wang's research has been published in premier venues across systems, security, and AI, including SIGMOD, VLDB, USENIX Security, MICRO, NeurIPS, IJCAI, ICCV, and EMNLP. Beyond his core focus, he actively collaborates across disciplines, contributing to projects in AI, machine learning, hardware systems, healthcare, and biomedicine. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University, where he was advised by Prof. Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Prof. Kartik Nayak.

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Join Trusted CI's announcements mailing list for information about upcoming events. To submit topics or requests to present, see our call for presentations. Archived presentations are available on our site under "Past Events."