Deadline: 01-Aug-2025
The eBPF Foundation is inviting faculty members from universities and research institutes to apply for its Academic Research Grant program. The Foundation is interested in supporting a wide range of research topics related to eBPF, including program verification, formal verification of verifiers and JITs, and overcoming limitations of the eBPF verifier.
Other areas of focus include scalability and maintainability of the verifier, improvements in eBPF program development and deployment, as well as eBPF-based approaches to security, threat management, network performance analysis, application profiling, CPU scheduling, and improving application efficiency. Research on eBPF use in embedded systems, unexplored or emerging use cases, and techniques to optimize eBPF programs through static or dynamic methods is also encouraged.
The Foundation welcomes studies on using hardware security or performance features to enhance eBPF, improving in-kernel JIT compilers, safely enabling unprivileged eBPF use, and exploring the interaction between eBPF and end-host networking. High-performance networking applications, security innovations for end-host programmability, scaling eBPF in distributed systems, and techniques for fault isolation in eBPF or related systems are also key areas of interest.
The grant amount is $250,000. Applicants must comply with applicable U.S. and international laws and regulations and be current full-time or part-time faculty at an accredited academic institution or reputable research institute. They must also serve as the Principal Investigator for any award received.
Proposals should include a project summary (up to two pages) outlining the focus area, techniques, relevant prior work, and a timeline with milestones and expected outcomes. A draft budget description (one page) detailing approximate costs and fund allocation is required. Applicants must also submit CVs for all project participants and provide organization details, including tax and administrative contacts.
For more information, visit eBPF Foundation.
