Cyber

I2O explores game-changing technologies in the fields of information science and software to anticipate and create rapid shifts in the complex national security landscape. Conflict can occur in traditional domains such as land, sea, air, and space, and in emerging domains such as cyber and other types of irregular warfare. I2O’s research portfolio is focused on anticipating new modes of warfare in these emerging areas and developing the concepts and tools necessary to provide decisive advantage for the U.S. and its allies.

Modern society depends on information and information depends on information systems. Timely, insightful, reliable, and relevant information drives success. This is not lost on military leaders who well appreciate the critical importance of information for national security. As Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1597, “Knowledge is power.”

As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. That is why today DARPA announced it will launch an ambitious four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years.

LADS will develop a new protection paradigm that separates security-monitoring functionality from the protected system, focusing on low-resource, embedded and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The program will explore technologies to associate the running state of a device with its involuntary analog emissions across different physical modalities including, but not limited to, electromagnetic emissions, acoustic emanations, power fluctuations and thermal output variations.

As new defensive technologies make old classes of vulnerability difficult to exploit successfully, adversaries move to new classes of vulnerability. Vulnerabilities based on flawed implementations of algorithms have been popular targets for many years. However, once new defensive technologies make vulnerabilities based on flawed implementations less common and more difficult to exploit, adversaries will turn their attention to vulnerabilities inherent in the algorithms themselves.