Network Technology

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.

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.

The threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks has been well-recognized in the data networking world for two decades. Such attacks are orchestrated by sets of networked hosts that collectively act to disrupt or deny access to information, communications or computing capabilities, generally by exhausting critical resources such as bandwidth, processor capacity or memory of targeted resources.

The goal of the RADICS program is to develop innovative technologies for detecting and responding to cyber-attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure, especially those parts essential to DoD mission effectiveness. DARPA is interested specifically in early warning of impending attacks, situation awareness, network isolation and threat characterization in response to a widespread and persistent cyber-attack on the power grid and its dependent systems.