SPICE Professor Wang Receives NSF Frontiers Award To Start Center For Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC)


SPICE Professor Xiaofeng Wang will start the Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC) and has secured a $9 million NSF Frontiers Award to do so, with $2.9 million going to Indiana University.  CDCC will be a multi-university center performing “research, education, knowledge transfer, and workforce development” that creates practical and scalable data-in-use solutions based in Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) on cloud and edge systems.

Working with co-PI Haixu Tang, Professor Wang’s team will work to find a “holy grail of data protection” that is built on four fundamental building blocks: (1) an open ecosystem for TEE code certification, (2) novel dynamic policy models and enforcement data-use models that include scalable trust management and data control on TEE nodes, (3) ensuring computational workflow protections for TEE nodes, and (4) usability centered studies in stakeholder preference and expectations in DCC technologies.

CDCC also plans a significant component for broadening participation and diversity inclusion in its efforts.  Partnering with Purdue University, Penn State, Carnegie Mellon University, The Ohio State University, Spelman College, Duke University and Yale University, the center will be able to impact not only the future of secure computing and data storage, but also the next generation of researchers and cyber defenders.

Additional information on this and other NSF Frontiers Awards can be found at both IU News and at NSF News.  The award itself can be read at the NSF award page.