Cyber

The Department of Defense (DoD) maintains one of the largest computer networks in the world. The network follows DoD personnel across the globe collecting, transferring and processing information in forms as diverse as data warehouses, in-the-field mobile devices and mission computers on board F-18’s. This network is also constantly changing in size and shape as new missions are undertaken and new technology is deployed. In military terms, that means the cyber terrain of the DoD network is constantly shifting.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) is sponsoring a Proposers Day to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the anticipated Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization (RADICS) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). The Proposers Day will be held on Monday, December 14, 2015, from 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM (ET) at the DARPA Conference Center, located at 675 N. Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia 22203. For more information, visit FedBizOpps.gov.

To be effective, Department of Defense (DoD) cybersecurity solutions require rapid development times. The shelf life of systems and capabilities is sometimes measured in days. Thus, to a greater degree than in other areas of defense, cybersecurity solutions require that DoD develops the ability to build quickly, at scale and over a broad range of capabilities.

The United States military is heavily dependent on networked communication to fulfill its missions. The wide-area network (WAN) infrastructure that supports this communication is vulnerable to a wide range of failures and cyber attacks that can severely impair connectivity and mission effectiveness at critical junctures. Examples include inadvertent or malicious misconfiguration of network devices, hardware and software failures, extended delays in Internet Protocol (IP) route convergence, denial of service (DoS) flooding attacks, and a variety of control-plane and data-plane attacks resulting from malicious code embedded within network devices.

Malicious actors in cyberspace currently operate with little fear of being caught due to the fact that it is extremely difficult, in some cases perhaps even impossible, to reliably and confidently attribute actions in cyberspace to individuals. The reason cyber attribution is difficult stems at least in part from a lack of end-to-end accountability in the current Internet infrastructure.