Building Resilience against Systemic Cyber Risk

The Scope:

• The probability of a cyber catastrophe events occurring is challenging to predict given the fast-evolving technology, risk landscape, and man-made character. This Call hence asks to take a different perspective and focuses on the resilience against cyber catastrophes. It should not address the likelihood of certain larger scenarios occurring or the how such scenarios originate. This Call assumes cyber catastrophes are possible, and when they occur, greater resilience will help reduce the impact and allow for faster recovery.

Direction of work:

• We ask applicants to contribute to increasing our understanding of economic resilience against cyber catastrophes. Being resilient may refer to concepts such as being less vulnerable by design (e.g., introduce circuit breakers); reducing negative impact (e.g., increase industry specific support agreements, develop public private partnerships); recovering swiftly (e.g., establish protocols)

• Work will require choices around specific cyber catastrophe scenarios (e.g., cyber-caused outages of critical infrastructure, mass malware events, cloud provider outages, impact of the quantum computing), scope of cascading and accumulating impact, considerations about specific industries or regions, assumptions on the origins and motivation of such shock scenarios (political actors, criminals, operational handling, financial gain). These are at the discretion of the submitting parties.

• The results of the work need to improve our understanding of where our economy and businesses are most / least resilient against certain scenarios, how could we measure resilience (e.g. stress testing), where additional / different resilience levels may have the largest positive impact, and what means may be adequate to achieve such additional / different levels of resilience.

• Applicants are free to choose research methods they deem fit to approach the selected aspects. Given the wide array of possible themes, a focus on selected scenarios, industries, regions, or technologies is appreciated.

Eligibility Requirements

The grant aims at supporting promising researchers or research groups. Funding recipients need to be academic institutions which can either apply as 1) a Sole Applicant (one academic institution) or 2) Consortium Applicant, (collaboration amongst two or more academic institutions). Project Proposals must always be led by ONE Principal Investigator who is nominated by the institution leading the application process.

Academic institutions are the only eligible direct beneficiaries which may receive funding under this call. Private companies, NGOs, governmental bodies, foundations, independent research centers, cultural institutions (such as museums), and hospitals are not eligible as direct beneficiaries. However, due to the applied nature of the funding, it is possible for academic institutions to collaborate and partner with other organizations from public and private sectors. The non-academic institutions can be listed as associated partners and may receive part of the funding from the institution, agreed upon within each proposal's own set-ups.

Application Instructions

Please submit:

1. A one‐page letter of intent with a description of proposed aims and approach.
2. If the final application requires a diversity statement or statement of broader impacts, please summarize your plans to address the specific requirements on an additional page.
3. CV (not biosketch) of the PI.

to limitedsubs@uw.edu by 5:00 PM Wednesday, January 3, 2024. Proposals are due to the sponsor 2/15/2024, so you will need to have your materials in to the Office of Sponsored Programs by 2/6/2024 if given the go‐ahead by the Limited Submissions review committee.