Travel: NSF Student Travel Grant for 2025 IEEE Secure Development (SecDev) Conference

This award will fund about 10 U.S.-based graduate students for attending the IEEE Secure Development conference (SecDev 2025) in October 2025. 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. 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.

Funding participation for students who would otherwise be unable to attend 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 range 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, including lower-resourced institutions that are less well-represented at academic conferences, can participate.

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.

Award Number: 2532518
Principal Investigator: Kyungtae Kim
Funds Obligated: $12,000
State: NH