Project Grant 2442993

Award Date 7/15/25
Completion Date 6/30/30
Dollars Obligated $344K
Federal Grant Program
47.070
Assistance Type
Project Grant
Place of Performance
Blacksburg, VA, USA
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This Project Grant award, totaling $343,803, was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Federal Grant Program (CFDA 47.070). The grant was awarded to Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) to develop an automatic evaluation framework and efficient protection schemes for defending against transient execution attacks across different CPU platforms.

The key products and services to be delivered under this award include:

  1. A novel reinforcement learning-assisted framework for agile attack surface analysis and mitigation evaluation across CPU platforms, enabling practical evaluation of attacks on black box processors.
  2. Exploration of commercial hardware security features to efficiently protect the integrity of transient execution, focusing on protecting pointer access during transient execution.
  3. Co-design of block cipher and microarchitecture to offer a secure pointer protection mechanism against both transient execution attacks and memory safety attacks.
  4. Integration of the research with education and outreach, including creating course modules to help bridge the gap between concepts and practice, and engaging students at all levels with hands-on experiences.

The award period runs from July 15, 2025 to June 30, 2030. No sub-awards are planned under this grant.

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