Project Grant 2219464

This $600,000 National Science Foundation project grant will fund the development of an Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Vulnerability Assessment and Remediation framework at Colorado State University-Pueblo from August 2022 to July 2025. The framework aims to address challenges in effectively assessing and prioritizing the hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities often identified across multiple virtual environments in cloud infrastructures through two research thrusts. The first thrust will utilize machine learning techniques to automatically group vulnerable virtual machines for prioritization. The second thrust will leverage natural language processing to link discovered vulnerabilities to disclosed vulnerabilities with remediation strategies by analyzing vulnerability scan descriptions. $150,000 of the award will be subawarded to the University of Arizona to support data collection, algorithm development and evaluation efforts led by Co-Principal Investigator Dr. Chen. Both universities intend to disseminate results and integrate the research into cybersecurity and data analytics curricula. This project aligns with the goals of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering program to support innovative computing and cyberinfrastructure research.