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Funded Programs

FY27 Funded Programs

In support of the CCI mission, CCI SWVA funds programs to support cybersecurity research, innovation, and workforce development programs throughout the year. Listed below are summaries of individual projects within each of the funded programs utilizing support from CCI's fiscal year 2027 appropriation.

1. Title: FALCON: Failure-resilient AI and quantum-in-Loop for Cascade Optimization in National Power Grid

PI: Manish Bansal
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Ali Mehrizi-Sani (VT) and Chen-Ching Liu (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

2. Title: Verified Agent Identity for Internet-Scale AI Ecosystems: A Measurement-Driven Defense for the MCP and A2A Trust Anchors 
PI: Tijay Chung
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech

Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

3. Title: Fundamentals of Structure-Aware Resilient Online Learning
PI: Harpreet Dhillon
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution:  Mohamed A. Abd-Elmagid (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

4. Title: AquaGuard: Defense-in-Depth Cyberbiosecurity for AI-Enabled Seafood Supply Chains
PI: Yiming Feng
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Na Meng (VT), Lingjia Liu (VT, and Feras Batarseh (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

5. Title: Securing Agentic AI Systems Using Neuro-Symbolic Guardrails
PI: Murat Kantarcioglu
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech

Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

6. Title: RFAD-Sec: Radiance-Field Anomaly Detection for Resilient Wireless Security
PI: Lingjia Liu
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Haihan Nan (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

7. Title: RedToBlue: An Agentic AI Learning Environment for Integrated Cybersecurity Education
PI: Andrew Ray
Lead Institution: Radford University
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

8. Title: Cryptography Beyond One-Way Functions: Security from Quantum Scrambling and Information Recovery
PI: Charles Cao
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Atul Mantri (VT)
Funding Program:2027 Call for Research Proposals

9. Title: SkillGuard: Runtime Defense for LLM Agents Against Malicious-Skill Supply-Chain Attacks
PI: Peng Gao
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

10. Title: Measuring and Mitigating Motion Telemetry Leakage in Networked XR
PI: Bo Ji
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Tijay Chung (VT) and Brendan David-John (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

11. Title: Cyber-Resilient Remote Assistance for Level 4 Automated Heavy Vehicles: A Human-in-the-Loop Study of Operator Decision-Making Under Cybersecurity-Related Disruptions
PI: Xiaojian Jin
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Nicholas Britten (VT), Zeb Bowden (VT), and Andrew Krum (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

12. Title: Quantum and Post-Quantum Algorithms for Secure, High-Performance Systems
PI: Gretchen Matthews
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Kirsten Morris (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

13. Title: Scalable Intelligence Generation for Narrative, AI Linguistics (SIGNAL)
PI: Elliott Rheault
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Alan Michaels (VT), Jared Byers (VT), and Chris Henshaw (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

14. Title: ProbAudit: Prompt-Aware Probabilistic Audit Guidance for Securing LLM-Generated Code
PI: Eli Tilevich
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech

Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

15. Title: Securing the LLM Fine-Tuning Interface
PI: Bimal Viswanath
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Tu Vu (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

16. Title: Efficient Privacy-Preserving Data Access in the Cloud Storage via Cryptographic Hardware-Software Co-Designs
PI: Wenjie Xiong
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech
Co-PIs & Institution: Thang Hoang (VT)
Funding Program: 2027 Call for Research Proposals

1. Title: RU AIware CTF contest: A cybersecurity contest with integrated AI agents for high schools and community colleges in the Commonwealth of Virginia
PI: Prem Uppuluri
Lead Institution: Radford University
Co-PIs & Institution: Joe CHase (RU)
Funding Program: FY27 Strategic Workforce Initiative

2. Title: Hack a Sat - Satellite Mission Design for Cybersecurity Competition
PI: Gustavo Gargioni
Lead Institution: Virginia Tech

Funding Program: FY27 Strategic Workforce Initiative