Cybersecurity research experiments are frequently performed in ad hoc ways, which severely retards scientific progress. Most researchers use a combination of methods and infrastructure to conduct experiments using one-off, painstaking, and error-prone processes that are never shared for reuse and validation. The lack of repeatable, reproducible, and reusable processes and other artifacts limits ones ability to build upon the work of others or to compare solutions. Enabling the community to share and reuse experiment artifacts is crucial to transforming the way cybersecurity research is conducted.

This project is SEARCCH: Sharing Expertise and Artifacts for Reuse through a Cybersecurity Community Hub. SEARCCH is creating a collaborative, community-driven platform that lowers the barrier to sharing by aiding researchers in packaging, importing, locating, understanding, and reusing experiment artifacts. The artifacts organized by the platform, including tools, methodologies, documentation, and data, can be deployed to community testbeds for performing new experiments. Concurrently, SEARCCH engages in outreach activities to build an active, diverse, online community around the hub to enable direct sharing of expertise and crowdsourcing research ideas and experiment design. Through a process of continuous learning and improvement, the hub will grow over time to include collections of artifacts covering a broad range of cybersecurity research topics and add support for newly identified community needs. These activities together will transform the way cybersecurity research is conducted in the cybersecurity community, improving the overall scientific quality of cybersecurity research through validation, repeatable sharing and reuse, and a collective approach to building on research results.

Collaborators

SEARCCH is led by a collaborative team with members across four institutions:

• Terry Benzel, University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute
• Jelena Mirkovic, University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute
• David Balenson, SRI International
• Laura Tinnel, SRI International
• Eric Eide, University of Utah
• Tim Yardley, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1925564. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.