Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2024 IEEE Secure Development (SecDev) Conference

This award will fund about 15 U.S.-based graduate students for attending the 2024 IEEE Secure Development (SecDev) conference from October 7-10, 2024 in Pittsburgh, PA. Research on software security usually focuses on detecting vulnerabilities in software and attacks on resources. However, there is little attention to how programmers can develop secure software from the ground up. The SecDev conference aims to continue its mission of providing a forum where researchers, practitioners, and decision makers can meet to discuss ideas that focus on building security into deployed systems, on topics including development libraries, tools, or processes to produce systems resilient to certain attacks; formal foundations that underpin a language, tool, or testing strategy that improves security; techniques that improve the scalability of security solutions for practical deployment; and experience, designs, or applications showing how to apply cryptographic techniques effectively to secure systems. This award will fund high-quality students who would otherwise not be able to participate in this event. Student participation in SecDev has a number of benefits, allowing them to meet with researchers and leaders in the community to advance both their on-going research and their career development. Student participation also serves larger goals of widening the talent pool of professionals and researchers focused on addressing challenges of developing critical secure systems and services. To this end, the conference will widely advertise the availability of support for students who need funding to attend, to increase the diversity of personal and institutional backgrounds of potential attendees. Students will be selected based on the quality and fit of their research to the goals of the conference, their financial need, and the benefit they are likely to gain from attending; the selection committee will also ensure that students from a wide range of institutions can participate in the conference. 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.