Security-Aware Systems
Abstract
(U) The Security-Aware Systems program will develop and advance a variety of potentially promising technologies to enable the military to field secure, survivable, self-monitoring, self-defending network centric systems. This program will develop security aware systems that will avoid brittleness and vulnerability, due to their ability to reason about their own security attributes, capabilities and functions with respect to specific mission needs. These systems will also dynamically adapt to provide desired levels of service while minimizing risk and providing coherent explanations of the relative safety of service level alternatives. These systems will bolster the reliability and security of critical, open source software systems by reducing vulnerabilities and logic errors, and providing state-of-the-art software analysis techniques augmented with cognitive decision-making techniques with the ultimate goal of applying these systems on to the Global Information Grid. Research efforts will also explore provable protection of information within systems that exhibit imperfect security. A new kind of computational framework is needed that enables critical information and program separation properties (e.g., information in one graphical user interface (GUI) window never leaks to another GUI window). Security-Aware Systems will also address the so-called “insider threat” by developing technologies that enable a fundamentally new approach for detecting insider threats that exploits recent advances in cognitive science to accurately model and learn the normal behavior of users. (U) The Application Communities (AC) effort will develop technologies to protect DoD information systems that employ commercial software applications against cyber attack and system failure by developing collaboration-based defenses that detect, respond to, and heal from attacks with little or no human assistance. The effort will leverage advances in information assurance research programs to 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. This capability will bring intelligent security adaptation to DoD systems, and make security properties and status more apparent to decision makers. AC technology will enable collections of similar systems to collaboratively generate a shared awareness of security vulnerabilities, vulnerability mitigation strategies, and early warnings of attack. AC will revolutionize the security of military information systems and reduce the threat from stealthy intrusion of critical systems and/or denial of service attacks. (U) The Self-Regenerative Systems (SRS) effort will design, develop, demonstrate and validate architectures, tools, and techniques for fielding systems capable of adapting to novel threats, unanticipated workloads and evolving system configurations. SRS technology will employ innovative techniques like biologically-inspired diversity, cognitive immunity and healing, granular and scalable redundancy, and higher-level functions such as reasoning, reflection and learning. SRS technologies will make critical future information systems more robust, survivable and trustworthy. SRS will also develop technologies to mitigate the insider threat. SRS-enabled systems will be able to reconstitute their full functional and performance capabilities after experiencing accidental component failure, software error, or even an intentional cyber-attack. These systems will also show a positive trend in reliability, actually exceeding initial operation capability and approaching a theoretical optimal performance level over long periods while maintaining robustness and trustworthiness attributes.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2011
- Source ID
- 326390009e6fc9da6368779b1d273f4e