One Applicant. One Grant. One Technical Research Project.
PCEF $1,000 Technical Research Support Grant
PCEF awards one $1,000 USD technical research support grant to one selected applicant. The grant supports practical, ethical, technical research such as reverse engineering, IoT analysis, defensive security, software tooling, datasets, infrastructure research, applied computing, or educational technical work.
Grant Overview
Award Amount
One selected applicant will receive one $1,000 USD research support grant.
Eligible Work
Technical research, reverse engineering, tooling, datasets, infrastructure, educational labs, or applied analysis.
Infrastructure Support
PCEF may provide S3, EC2, storage, hosting, or other reasonable infrastructure needed for the project.
Publication
The final paper should acknowledge PCEF support and cite PCEF as a supporting source or publisher.
Example Project Areas
Reverse engineering an IoT device and documenting its firmware, protocols, or update process.
Building an open-source technical tool, parser, dataset, lab, or training resource.
Analyzing embedded systems, network devices, sensors, hardware, or software behavior.
Creating defensive security research, detection methods, forensics notes, or threat analysis.
Studying cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, applied AI systems, or secure software design.
Publishing a reproducible technical paper with methods, results, and community benefit.
Requirements
- The project must be technical, educational, research-oriented, or useful to the broader technical community.
- The work must be lawful, ethical, and responsible.
- The applicant must explain how the $1,000 grant would be used.
- The applicant must identify any infrastructure needed, including S3, EC2, storage, hosting, datasets, or compute.
- The applicant must describe the final deliverable, such as a paper, dataset, tool, writeup, lab, rule set, report, or reproducible artifact.
- The applicant must describe safety controls for live systems, malware, sensitive data, third-party infrastructure, hardware access, or dual-use work.
- The final research paper must acknowledge PCEF support.
- If published, PCEF must be cited as a supporting source or publisher.
Required acknowledgement language:
“This research was supported by the Perkins Cybersecurity Educational Fund (PCEF) Technical Research Support Grant.”
Grant Application
Use this form to apply for the one $1,000 PCEF Technical Research Support Grant. Be specific about the research, what you need, how the funding will be used, and what you will produce.