REU Site: Integrative Challenges in Cybersecurity-Deception, Remediation, and Resilient Systems

Cybersecurity threats increasingly disrupt critical services such as healthcare, energy, and financial systems, affecting everyday life and national stability. These threats are no longer isolated technical problems; they involve complex interactions among digital systems, human decisions, and organizational responses. This project addresses these challenges by advancing a unified approach to understanding and improving how systems detect, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents. The project's novelties are the integration of intelligent deception techniques, automated system recovery, and human-centered decision analysis into a single, coordinated framework. The project's broader significance and importance are in strengthening the resilience of essential infrastructure, supporting national security, and expanding opportunities for undergraduate students to participate in advanced research. As a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site hosted at the University at Albany, State University of New York, the project combines education with hands-on discovery, contributing to workforce development and promoting scientific progress that benefits society at large. The project develops an interconnected set of research activities that examine cybersecurity from multiple perspectives. It creates adaptive digital environments that interact with attackers and collect detailed behavioral data, enabling deeper understanding of evolving threats. It constructs realistic simulated attack scenarios for industrial control systems to generate high-quality datasets for experimentation and evaluation. It incorporates methods to ensure that artificial intelligence systems used in defense are reliable, transparent, and resistant to misuse. In addition, it analyzes how decisions made by organizations and leaders influence the outcomes of cyber incidents, linking technical events with broader social and strategic factors.These activities are integrated through complementary research components and consistent evaluation frameworks across the project. The project advances knowledge of how intelligent and adaptive defense systems improve resilience, while producing open datasets, reusable tools, and trained participants who contribute to a stronger and more secure digital infrastructure. 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. NSF Award ID: 2548335 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: M Abdullah Canbaz | Institution: SUNY at Albany, ALBANY, NY | Award Amount: $464,622 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2548335 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2548335.html