Secure and trustworthy cyberspace: characteristics and contributions

Purpose: This paper aims to understand the characteristics and contributions of the secure and trustworthy cyberspace (SaTC) projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). These research projects were funded during the period of 2015–2023. Design/methodology/approach: The authors applied a data analytics approach to proposal records of 1,025 NSF SaTC projects. These records were downloaded from the NSF proposal database via its search function. The analysis includes bibliometric analysis, shallow natural language processing and manual content analysis. Findings: About 11 NSF divisions or units have sponsored SaTC research. About 214 universities or organizations in 44 states received SaTC funds. The key concepts of these projects include adversarial attacks, cryptography, cloud computing, internet of things, differential privacy, mobile devices and others. These projects were motivated by a lack of understanding or investigation of one or more technologies in the cybersecurity domain or the inefficacy of existing tools or algorithms. The objectives of these proposals included providing new insights and developing new tools, methods, frameworks, training courses and organizing workshops with support for workshop attendees. Among the funded projects, 60.82% proposed providing educational materials that would be beneficial to K-12 students, college students and the public. Research limitations/implications: The present data range from 2015 to May 2023. New projects awarded after May 2023 were not included. Practical implications: The findings provide rich and useful information for the funding agency, SaTC researchers and students. The funding agency may want to review their funding focus and fund distributions; SaTC researchers could refer to the topics and the objectives discussed in funded proposals when developing their new projects; and students at all levels could refer to SaTC topics, participating researchers and institutions for their learning. Originality/value: This study is the first attempt, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to analyze NSF SaTC projects. The analysis benefits researchers and students to gain an understanding of NSF-funded projects and insights into secure and trustworthy cyberspace areas.