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Invited Talk: SPHERE - A Research Infrastructure for Security and Privacy Experimentation
Abstract
Reproducible experimentation in accessible, user-friendly environments—supported by public datasets—is critical to accelerating progress in cybersecurity and privacy research. This talk presents an overview of SPHERE, a new research infrastructure being developed by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, Northeastern University, and the University of Utah. SPHERE features heterogeneous, modern hardware designed to meet the needs of over 80% of researchers. In addition to standard resources such as high-performance compute servers and GPUs, it includes programmable NICs and edge computing platforms. Beyond these capabilities, SPHERE offers unique resources for cyber-physical systems and IoT experimentation. This includes reconfigurable platforms for industrial control systems security research, as well as a remotely accessible smart home IoT testbed comprising more than 200 devices. We are also developing an extensive library of reusable research artifacts to streamline experimentation on the platform. Although SPHERE is still under construction, we are actively onboarding beta users. The platform already supports more than 150 research users and approximately 300 students each semester. SPHERE has also supported artifact evaluation for NDSS 2025 and 2026, and IEEE Security and Privacy 2026.
Bio
Jelena Mirkovic is Principal Scientist at the Information Sciences Institute and research associate professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She received her MS and PhD from UCLA. Jelena’s research interests span networking and security fields. She has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and the first book on DDoS. Her current research is focused on denial-of-service attacks, vulnerability scanning and user-centric security and privacy. Additionally, she works on methodologies for conducting security experiments and leads a large, NSF-funded project to build research infrastructure for cybersecurity experimentation, called SPHERE.