‘Censorship-Resistant,’ Thinking Internet in Works by Defense Department
wethepeoplewillnotbechipped.com
28 Jun 2010
In light of cyber defense and the new “Government 2.0” movement, the Department of Defense (DoD) has several new Web technologies under development. Below are some of the cyber projects included in the fiscal year 2011 DoD budget. Among them are projects to create “censorship-resistant” networks, biological-inspired and self-healing systems, and computer systems which can adapt and cooperate.
The projects come amidst growing cyber attacks against federal networks, and rising concerns in cybersecurity and internet freedom. Cybersecurity “incidents” increased by 400 percent from 2006 to 2009, and “Pervasive and sustained cyber attacks continue to pose a potentially devastating threat to the systems and operations of the federal government,” according to a recent report by the United States Government Accountability Office.
Censorship-Resistant Network and Secure Host
The new Securing the Hosts program is aimed to meet the DoD’s demands for “a new computing infrastructure with a much higher level of security,” according to the DoD budget. Included in the 2011 project are plans to “develop initial implementations for highly available, censorship-resistant network infrastructure,” according to the DoD budget.
This will create new and more secure computer languages and compilers, as well as automated proof tools and a new development environment. The project will include, but is not limited to, co-development of hardware and software. The goal is to make sure that from top to bottom—from hardware to software—everything in the system works together.
According to the DoD budget, it will have “cryptographic microcontrollers to permit cryptographic handshaking at all system layers,” which allows the lower levels to “establish a root of trust from the hardware” which are then bound to the upper levels of the system “cryptographically.”
Another part of the project, the Securing the Network program, will build a more secure computer network, through which data can be shared between computers. It will develop several methods for computers to determine which elements are trusted, including routers which allow “significant computing power” towards “virtualization features enabling multiple protocols to be deployed,” as well as other elements.
FY 2011 funding: $9.275 million
Biological-Inspired, Self-Defending, Self-Healing Web System
The “Cyber Immune” project includes investigating and developing cyber-security systems inspired by biological organisms. The project assumes that eliminating security risks is not necessarily possible, so it instead aims to create a “cyber-resilient” system which can defend itself, and “possibly even heal itself.”
This new Web security project pulls from DARPA’s “significant new breakthroughs by using the mechanisms of biological systems as inspiration for radical re-thinking of basic hardware and system designs,” according to the DoD budget description.
It adds, “This project seeks to accomplish the same in the cyber-security area.”
Among the steps being taken in 2010 to 2011 will be creating new “models of software” which allow the system to “detect the presence of cyber-attack agents.” Another part will be creating new techniques for the software system to balance its resources for defending against cyber-attacks, while still keeping the system running.
They will also be developing “initial concepts for methods of warding off attacks and, when possible, healing the system.”
FY 2011 funding: $15 million
Military 2.0, Crowd-Sourcing, and Self-Replicating Materials
The “Transformative Sciences” project is among the more odd items found in the 2011 budget. It includes wide-ranging developments in technology, by “converging technological forces and transformational trends in the areas of computing and the computing-reliant subareas of social sciences, life sciences, manufacturing, and commerce,” according to the DoD budget.
The research may allow the DoD to “anticipate the effects of potential discontinuities and gain the ability to adapt quickly and effectively whenever challenging disruptions occur,” and to “identify and exploit emerging trends that have the potential to disrupt military operations.”
It will look into large-scale custom manufacturing, particularly with 3-D printing technology which can reduce prototype costs; research “crowd-sourcing” networks to have thousands or millions of people collaborating with “large-scale computing power, cloud computing, mobile communication devices, and large-scale statistical data analysis toward the solution of a unified goal;” and conduct “‘cyber-agility’—research into a ‘clean slate’ approach to secure, adaptive and agile computer networks.”
Included in the 2011 plan will be to develop “engineered biological systems to create self-replicating materials for radical manufacturing methods.” There will also be a project to use “social networking to dramatically improve military situational awareness, not only of the locations of people and installations, but also social maps, key experiences, and leverage points.” There will also be efforts to “harness large numbers” of researchers to work on solving “key problems in Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), image processing, and other applications.”
FY 2011 funding: $10 million
Thinking Internet Systems Which ‘Adapt’ to Vulnerabilities
The “Security Aware-Systems” program has been under development for a few years now. The technology will “enable the military to field secure, survivable, self-monitoring, self-defending network centric systems.”
This will be done by creating security systems which know to avoid vulnerabilities through “their ability to reason about their own security attributes, capabilities, and functions with respect to specific mission needs,” according to the DoD budget.
Among its aims is to create a system where information from one graphical user interface (GUI) cannot leak into another GUI window. It will also eliminate the “insider threat” by creating technologies which can detect them.
There are two key parts to the program. First, the Application Communities (AC) effort will protect DoD information systems by using commercial software against cyber attacks and system failure “by developing collaboration-based defenses that detect, respond to, and heal from attacks with little or no human assistance.” It will “create a new generation of self-defending software that automatically responds to threats, and provides a comprehensive picture of security properties, displayed at multiple levels of abstraction and formality.”
The other part is the Self-Regenerating Systems (SRS) effort, which—similar to the Cyber Immune project—aims to create a biologically-inspired, self-healing system. It will use several techniques, “like biologically-inspired diversity, cognitive immunity and healing, granular and scalable redundancy, and higher-level functions such as reasoning, reflection and learning,” according to the DoD budget.
FY 2009 funding: $9.207 million
FY 2010 funding: $11.225 million
FY 2011 funding: $12 million
Thinking, Self-Reliant Computers Which can Cooperate
The “Cognitive Computing” project aims to “develop core technologies that enable computing systems to learn, reason, and apply knowledge gained through experience, and to respond intelligently to new and unforeseen events,” according to the DoD budget.
The technology will bring about systems which are more self-reliant, and have “cooperative behavior.” They will also be able to “reconfigure themselves and survive with reduced programmer intervention.”
According to the DoD budget, “These capabilities will make the difference between mission success and mission degradation or failure, even in the event of cyber-attack or component attrition resulting from kinetic warfare or accidental faults and errors.”
It adds, “As the military moves towards a dynamic expeditionary force, it is critical for systems to become more self sufficient.”
Funding for the program stretches into 2015.
FY 2009 funding: $81.549 million
FY 2010 funding: $99.825 million (estimated)
FY 2011 funding: $54.641 million (base estimate)
