CyLab awards 2026 seed funding

This year, CyLab awarded nearly $500,000 in seed funding to 10 research projects featuring CMU students, faculty, and staff PIs representing nine departments at the university. The funding was awarded on the projects’ intellectual merit, originality, potential impact, and fit towards the Security and Privacy Institute’s and industry partners’ priorities.

Proposals related to all areas of security and privacy were welcome. This year, the Carnegie Bosch Institute (CBI) provided funding for collaborative proposals related to AI for incident response and for cybersecurity awareness/training, and Checkout.com provided funding for cybercrime research.

CyLab Seed Funding is fueled by the generous support of our industry collaborators. We invite your organization to collaborate with our world-class researchers through the CyLab Partnership Program.

The awards selection committee comprised CyLab-affiliated faculty, who prioritized several factors when making their selections, including collaborations that include junior faculty and between CyLab faculty in multiple departments, seed projects that are good candidates for follow-up funding from government or industry sources, and non-traditional projects that may be difficult to fund through other sources, among other considerations.

Adaptive LLM Routing for Security Incident Detection, Triage, and Annotation (funded by CBI)

• Osman Yağan - assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Building Resilient Organizations with Educational Cybersecurity Games (funded by CBI)

• Jessica Hammer - associate professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Entertainment Technology Center; director, Center for Transformational Play
• Rotem Guttman - security researcher, Software Engineering Institute

Toward Private and Deniable Provenance in C2PA

• Sarah Scheffler - assistant professor, Engineering and Public Policy, Software and Societal Systems Department

Backtracking Agents for Security Vulnerability Repair

• Claire Le Goues - associate professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Ruben Martins - assistant research professor, Computer Science Department

Understanding the Telegram Bot Ecosystem

• Nicolas Christin - department head and professor, Software and Societal Systems Department; professor, Engineering and Public Policy

Structural Information Flow: Usable Language Based Security

• Jonathan Aldrich - professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Frank Pfenning - professor, Computer Science Department

Optimizing Canaries for Privacy Auditing with Metagradient Descent

• Steven Wu - associate professor, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Andrew Ilyas - assistant professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Software and Societal Systems Department

Understanding the Security Implications of GPU Optimizations

• Riccardo Paccagnella - assistant professor, Software and Societal Systems Department

How do Scientific Methods and Findings Propagate in the Security-and-Privacy Community?

• Lujo Bauer - professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Software and Societal Systems Department
• Nicolas Christin - department head and professor, Software and Societal Systems Department; professor, Engineering and Public Policy

Examining Human-AI Teaming and the Effects of GenAI in Live CTF Cybersecurity Training

• Hanan Hibshi - assistant teaching professor, Information Networking Institute
• Cleotilde Gonzalez - research professor, Social and Decision Sciences