17 July 2017

DoD sends industry its cyber wish list

By: Mark Pomerleau

The Pentagon’s Department of Defense, Rapid Reaction Technology Office, which looks to develop prototypes and host technology demonstrations to counter emerging and anticipated threats, has issued a special notice to industry this week announcing its intention to conduct a solutions meeting to support the Cyber Science and Technology Community of Interest.

The meeting, which will occur in late October, will provide “selected innovative companies with an opportunity to make short technical presentations to government representatives about their technologies and products,” the notice states. “There is a potential for companies to be selected for pilot projects or experimentation if their technology appears to match the DoD’s cyber needs.”

The notice lists a variety of innovative technology needs in cyber under a series of broad subject areas.

These include autonomous cyber defense; cyber situational awareness, planning and decision support; cybersecurity for infrastructure, endpoints and edge devices; control systems, internet of things security; and hardware and software assurance.

Last summer, the same organization issued a similar notice seeking a variety of technologies such as standoff detection/sensors, device neutralization, counter vehicle attached IEDs (VAIEDs), electronic countermeasures for advanced wireless signals and techniques, robotics, data analytics/predictive algorithms, counter tunnel and mapping technologies and biometric signature collection and exploitation.

Here's an example of a few technologies this week’s notice lists under each category:

Autonomous cyber defense: Artificial intelligence/machine learning, automatic cyber resilience and configuration tools for cyberspace operations. 

Cyber situational awareness, planning and decision support: Risk assessment, planning and course of action support, visibility of missions, systems and adversaries and automated mission mapping to infrastructure. 

Cybersecurity for infrastructure, endpoints and edge devices: Rapidly deployable tools for network mapping/awareness and discovery, response and eradication of attacks as well as device and software anonymization. 

Control systems, internet of things security: Manage, monitor, detect and alert abnormal behaviors and automated identification of devices and protocols. 

Hardware and software assurance: Scalable, intelligent code/software analysis and repair.

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