Welcome to the Sandia Cyber Institute for Rigorous Experimentation!
SCIRE aims to foster research partnerships between national laboratories, government, academia, and industry to develop and apply robust scientific techniques that address our nation’s most critical cyber challenges.
We aim to transform how the national security community approaches cybersecurity.
Our institute brings together a unique group of experts across emulation, uncertainty quantification, data analysis, stochastic optimization, and operational cybersecurity to provide the scale and rigor needed to defend high-consequence cyber systems. This unparalleled approach provides decision makers with high-fidelity risk assessments and analysis of a range of alternative defense strategies.
Want to learn more about specific challenges SCIRE is tackling?
Sandia, UC Davis, and USC’s Information Sciences Institute host a free virtual workshop each fall on Cyber Experimentation and the Science of Security (CESoS). The goal of CESoS ‘21 was to lay the foundations for developing rigorous, generalizable approaches to defend against and thwart the growing security threats posed to cyber-physical systems.

CESoS ’21
Current Software Tools
SCIRE aggregates tools developed independently at Sandia to support the full workflow of rigorous cyber experimentation.

minimega
minimega is a tool for launching and managing virtual machines. It can run on your laptop or distributed across a cluster. minimega is fast, easy to deploy, and can scale to run on massive clusters with virtually no setup.
More information: http://minimega.org/

DAKOTA
The Dakota project delivers both state-of-the-art research and robust, usable software for optimization and UQ. Broadly, the Dakota software’s advanced parametric analyses enable design exploration, model calibration, risk analysis, and quantification of margins and uncertainty with computational models.
More information: https://dakota.sandia.gov/

Pyomo
Pyomo is a Python-based open-source software package that supports a diverse set of optimization capabilities for formulating, solving, and analyzing optimization models.
More information: http://www.pyomo.org/

SCEPTRE
Sceptre provides a comprehensive ICS/SCADA modeling and simulation capability that captures the cyber/physical impacts of targeted cyber events on critical infrastructure and control systems.
More information: SCEPTRE Factsheet