Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2025 Workshop on Hardware Attack Artifacts, Analysis, and Metrics (WHAAAM)

This award will provide financial support to about 20 U.S.-based student attendees to attend the 2025 Workshop on Hardware Attack Artifacts, Analysis, and Metrics (WHAAAM). WHAAAM will be held at the 2025 Design Automation Conference, a premier hardware design venue. The workshop aims to promote open and practical contributions that improve our ability to reason about offensive hardware and systems security. Hardware attacks pose an increasingly important real-world threat from well-resourced companies and nations; however, much research on hardware attacks is more academic or theoretical than practical. The WHAAAM workshop looks to bridge this gap in the hardware and systems security research community through encouraging open-source, artifact-driven submissions that increase understanding of practical attacker capabilities and robust responses. The workshop has a strong community-building element, bringing together academic, industrial, and governmental professionals to share innovations in the space of hardware security. It also seeks to broaden the set of students engaged in hardware security research, helping support early-stage research students who are not yet publishing in conferences. Students attending the one-day conference will gain more exposure to hardware security research, and benefit from professional development in the form of both networking and a poster session where they can present their work. 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.