Artificial intelligence is at the center of multiple cybersecurity grant awards that the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative announced on Friday.
Nineteen projects focused on critical infrastructure — including transportation, power grids, water, supply chains and health care — will divide $1.9 million in what CCI Executive Director Luiz DaSilva called the initiative’s “biggest program yet.”
The Commonwealth Cyber Initiative is Virginia’s official hub for cybersecurity research, innovation and commercialization. The General Assembly created the Arlington-based CCI in 2018.
The seed grants will go to projects featuring inter-university teamwork, with researchers from two or more universities on each project, according to a news release from Virginia Tech. Virginia Military Institute, Longwood University, the University of Virginia, Christopher Newport University, George Mason University, Old Dominion University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech and the College of William & Mary are represented among the grantees.
Fourteen of the proposals feature AI. DaSilva said in the news release that AI is increasingly shaping cybersecurity, creating both new risks and new tools to defend threats.
“The critical infrastructure we rely upon — power, water, manufacturing and other vital systems — is vulnerable to cyberattacks now more than ever before,” said DaSilva, a cybersecurity professor based at the Virginia Tech Research Center in Arlington. “Fortunately, Virginia has a powerful cohort of cybersecurity researchers who combine their expertise to tackle these challenges.”
Virginia Tech has researchers involved in 11 of the projects. It teamed up with VMI for a project to develop AI-powered simulation and defense strategies to secure power grids against cyber threats. Longwood University and Virginia Tech have paired to explore quantum-powered machine learning for detecting threats in water networks.
UVa researchers are partnering with Virginia Tech counterparts to use large language model reasoning to detect intrusion into industrial control systems.
Teaming with George Mason, Virginia Tech researchers are using neuromorphic computing — mimicking the way the human brain works — to delve beyond 5G wireless in protecting water infrastructure management.
Virginia Tech is involved with two proposals that aren’t AI-driven. Another project with George Mason seeks to design physical and data-layer mechanisms to project 6G networks. William & Mary will join Virginia Tech on yet another NextG matter, protecting networks from malicious or compromised network automation tools called xApps.
“These 19 seed grants will lay the groundwork for future centers and larger projects with both national and local impact,” DaSilva said. “This is our biggest program yet. We received more than three times the number of funded proposals, a clear sign of the excitement and momentum among Virginia’s cybersecurity researchers.”
The other projects and their participants are:
- Agentic AI for Critical Infrastructure: Empowering critical infrastructure with agentic AI to automate asset management and threat triage for cost‑effective cybersecurity (Virginia Tech and Old Dominion).
- AI‑Powered Video and Audio Side Channels: Leveraging video and audio side channels to enable smarter, adaptive anomaly detection for critical infrastructure cybersecurity (George Mason and Virginia Tech).
- Autonomous LLM Agents for Microgrid SOC: Agentic AI-powered SOC (security operations center) for microgrids to deliver continuous monitoring and cyber defense (Old Dominion, Virginia Tech, William & Mary).
- Bastion: AI-driven platform for hardening legacy systems and detecting runtime anomalies without costly re‑engineering (UVa and George Mason).
- Cyber Resilience for Energy Systems: AI-driven malware detection for SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems to strengthen energy sector resilience (William & Mary and Virginia Tech).
- Cyber‑Resilient Multi‑Sensor Radiation Monitoring: Enhancing cyber‑resilience of AI-driven radiation monitoring systems at Jefferson Lab (Old Dominion and VCU).
- FORTAI: Zero‑trust (never trust, always verify) security for Agentic AI infrastructures using AI-driven anomaly detection (UVa and George Mason).
- Intelligent Framework for Securing IoT Systems: Hardware‑aware AI framework for rapid, reliable Internet of Things (IoT) firmware verification to secure critical infrastructure (Old Dominion and George Mason).
- OpenCIVI: AI-driven, verifiable security for V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) systems with open benchmarks and portable defense stacks (Virginia Tech and VCU).
- Scalable AI‑driven Cybersecurity for Manufacturing: Helping manufacturers to protect supply chains through proactive detection and adaptive mitigation (George Mason and VCU).
- SecureLFE: Strengthening cybersecurity for Linux Foundation Energy’s open-source ecosystem with AI‑driven vulnerability management and lifecycle-aware SBOM (software bill of materials, a list of code components) tools (Old Dominion and Christopher Newport).
- SHIELD: Secure, battery-less, smart hardware for predictive maintenance in critical infrastructure (UVa and VCU).
- Z‑TRACS: Defending traffic signals against cyber spoofing with zero‑trust and reinforcement learning (William & Mary and UVa).