In our highly interconnected technology-dependent world, there is a tremendous need for cybersecurity at every aspect of our cyberinfrastructure, that comprises software, hardware, networking, and data storage, in addition to how people integrate with this infrastructure. Bad actors are always looking for vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure to exploit and hold people, companies and even governments hostage for personal gain. The rapid pace at which technology is evolving constantly exposes new attack vectors and zero-day exploits that need to be quickly detected and responded to, without which serious damage can be inflicted on people, data and society at large.

The goal of this RFP is to solicit proposals that aim to conduct cybersecurity research in emerging technology verticals such as Healthcare, IOT, and manufacturing in addition to the traditional areas such as perimeter defenses (e.g., firewalls) where Cisco has been a long-established leader. Specific areas of research include but are not limited to the following.

Healthcare Security and Privacy:

• Techniques for securing electronic health records (EHRs) and ensuring appropriate controls around who gets access to them to preserve privacy
• Solutions for securing legacy medical devices that are not as well maintained and software not upgraded properly
• Detecting data breaches and alerting quickly
• Zero trust approaches for securing largely inter-connected healthcare industry
• Simplifying security solutions for non-tech savvy patients and caregivers

IoT Security and Privacy:

• Prevent hijacking of IoT devices and ransomware
• Security in smart home environments
• Hardening IoT devices that are intermittently connected to the Internet
• Securing Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

AI/ML & Security

• Security of AL/ML, Privacy-preserving machine learning, ML on encrypted data, Adversarial ML, Data poisoning, AI ethics & fairness, Trusted AI, Machine unlearning, Trusted federated learning, Autonomous driving
• Security using AI/ML: threat analysis, threat hunting, vulnerability & attack detection, anomaly detection, automatic hardening, automated penetration testing
• Advanced AI/ML techniques for Cybersecurity (e.g., anomaly detection)
• Applications of Knowledge Graphs and Causal Modeling for cybersecurity use cases
• AI/ML techniques for automated detection of Zero-Day vulnerabilities

Quantum Computing

• Quantum-safe crypto, Quantum key distribution, Secure quantum computing and networks

Security in Hybrid Cloud and Environments

• Managing security and privacy across heterogeneous devices with different home/work personas
• Preventing unauthorized access to secure and confidential data
• Observability, access tracking and control of data and resources
• Data security, privacy, data remanence issues
• Trusted and secure execution

Security in Manufacturing sector:

• Managing insider threats
• Securing cyber-physical systems such as smart doors, locks/alarms, security cameras
• Use of computer vision techniques for securing manufacturing floors
• False positive reduction and prioritization of alerts
• Counterfeit detection and provenance
• Supply chain security

Other:

• Monitoring and Managing (observability and controls) security risk of software, hardware, device architectures, and systems
• Exfiltration of confidential data and information
• Honeypots for detecting bad actors, Insider threats
• Scalable and automated penetration testing techniques
• Zero-trust service mesh architectures

Proposal Submission:

After a preliminary review, we may ask you to revise and resubmit your proposal.

RFPs may be withdrawn as research proposals are funded, or interest in the specific topic is satisfied.

Researchers should plan to submit their proposals as soon as possible.

General Requirements for Consideration, Proposal Details, FAQs

You can find the information by scrolling down to the bottom of the webpage: Research Gifts. If your questions are not answered in the FAQs, please contact research@cisco.com.