Conference: Network and Distributed System Security Symposium 2025

This award provides funding to support about 30 U.S.-based students attending the 2025 Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium in Feburary 2025. The NDSS Symposium is an annual conference hosted by the Internet Society that provides a leading venue for cybersecurity experts and practitioners to present their latest work around researching, designing, developing, exploiting, and deploying the technologies that define network and distributed systems.

Attendees include university researchers, educators, technology officers, industry experts, students, and corporate sponsors. This range of backgrounds will allow student attendees to interact with a wide variety of key actors in the network and distributed systems community, building both their intellectual breadth and professional networks.

Stronger Internet security is vital to the well-being of all Americans in today's society; the NDSS Symposium provides a leading venue for cybersecurity researchers and practitioners to exchange experiences and strengthen common approaches for safeguarding Internet security. Funding student attendees who would otherwise be financially unable to attend helps develop the next generation of talent.

In particular, the NDSS Symposium seeks to solicit applications from students with a wide range of institutional, disciplinary, and personal backgrounds in order to expand the talent pool available to both cybersecurity research and practice. Students will be selected based on their evidence of interest, leadership, and collaboration around security-related topics; their financial need and benefits of attending for both themselves and the conference; and their ability to bring a wide variety of perspectives to the field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.