Fundamental Changes Coming to DARPA

Last Updated on Friday, 20 February 2009 08:36 Written by admin Friday, 20 February 2009 08:36

Starting with finding a replacement for outgoing director Tony Tether, DARPA is headed for a complete rebirth as an agency whose focus is on game-changing research without having to prove short-term results.

Aviation Week has the story and lists possible replacements:

Potential replacements include Lisa Porter, a former NASA associate administrator who now heads the Central Intelligence Agency’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Pete Worden, director of NASA Ames Research Center.

Others include Mark Lewis, former U.S. Air Force chief scientist; Jane Alexander, deputy director of the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency; and Amy Alving, SAIC’s chief technology officer and former Darpa office director.

New details on the National Cyber Range

Last Updated on Friday, 9 January 2009 10:16 Written by admin Friday, 9 January 2009 10:16

DARPA has announced its Phase I awards to six competing companies for the design and creation of the National Cyber Range:

• BAE Systems$3.3 million
• General Dynamics $1.9 million
• Johns Hopkins University $7.3 million
• Lockheed Martin $5.3 million
• Northrop Grumman $344,097
• Science Applications International Corp. $2.8 million
• Sparta $8.6 million

Aviation Week explains DARPA’s intentions for project:

The range is intended to become the premier U.S. cyber test facility, according to DARPA officials. The products will be unbiased and quantitative assessments of information assurance and survivability tools. The laboratory is to replicate complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks for current and future Defense Department weapons and operations.

The capabilities to be tested are host-security systems, local-area-network security tools and suites, wide-area network systems operating on unusual bandwidths, tactical networks including the problematic mobile ad hoc networks, and new protocol stacks. Innovations are expected to include development of advanced automated test ranges and the testing of revolutionary cyber-research programs.

The competing companies will eventually be asked to build working prototypes of the range that can perform the following tasks:

• demonstration of packet capture, event log collection, malware event collection and automated attacks
• Responsive traffic generators will have to drive office software products, browsers, media players and e-mail clients
• Traffic generation systems will involve incoming/outgoing e-mail, port scanning and automated attacks

By phase 3, the candidate system will have to reconstitute test nodes within 15 minutes, reconfigure the range within one hour, create a 10,000-node test from DARPA-provided requirement within two hours and perform time synchronization across all machines to within 1 millisecond, and demonstrate human-level behavior on 80 percent of traffic-generated events.

Deep Green, Arena War, and anticipating your enemy

Last Updated on Wednesday, 30 April 2008 11:16 Written by admin Wednesday, 30 April 2008 11:16

IBM built Deep Blue to conquer the world of Chess. DARPA is building Deep Green to conquer uncertainty in the battlefield. One of the main participants in DARPA’s research effort is the USC Viterbi School’s Information Sciences Institute.

“The Deep Green program, a next-generation battle command and decision support technology, is the vision of Col. John Surdu, who manages the program for the Information Processing Techniques Office of DARPA.

The system interleaves anticipatory planning with adaptive execution to help the commander think ahead, identify when a plan is going awry, and prepare options, before they are needed.

Deep Green will use a human operator’s hand drawn sketches and words to induce intent. It will generate options for all sides in an operation and predict the likelihood of multiple futures.

By presenting decisions early and allowing the commander to “see the future,” Deep Green supports commander’s visualization and adaptive execution, enabling correct, timely decisions by the commander.”

Another ISI team is working on a different aspect of the same problem with their own program called Adversarial Continuous Time and Space Search:

“ACTSS represents collections of interacting combatants (units) by what are called “fluents,” a concept close to the time-space operators called vectors familiar to first year physics students.

“Fluents represent periods in which activities of the units modeled don’t conflict or interfere with each other, or complete their mission or arrive at their goal.  When they do, a decision point is reached, where new vectors have to be assigned, creating new fluents.”

The science behind this approach is pretty innovative. Be sure to read the full press relase at the Vertibi School’s Web site.