Cybersecurity is important to protecting Army systems from sophisticated attacks on military networks within the face of ever increasing importance of cyber systems.
The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has established a Collaborative Research Alliance, or CRA, that will include an alliance of ARL, U.S. Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center, academia and industry researchers to explore the elemental foundations of cyber science issues within the context of Army networks.
A cooperative agreement was awarded to the consortium, Sept. 20, led by Pennsylvania State University, and including Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University, the University of California at Davis, and the University of California Riverside.
The Army will fund the alliance for 5 years, with an optional five-year renewal at $3.3 million to $5.2 million annually.
“The CRA gives us a chance to jointly advance the theoretical foundations of a science of cybersecurity within the context of Army networks,” said Dr. Ananthram Swami, who was recently announced because the Collaborative Alliance Manager, ARL, for the cybersecurity CRA. “Such a science will eventually result in network defense strategies and empirically validated tools. Substantial interactions and staff rotations between domain experts and scientists around the consortium and ARL could be vital to enable the joint research which will make sure the success of this system.”
The hallmark of ARL’s CRAs is that alliance members work interdependently during the scientific process.
“We generally enter into most of these alliances with complex problems in mind,” said Dr. John Pellegrino, director of the ARL directorate that manages the CRA, Computational and knowledge Sciences Directorate. “The fundamental science of cybersecurity is a protracted-standing challenge a good way to take a while to unravel.”
ARL has identified three interrelated aspects of cybersecurity to explore and a cross-cutting psychosocial perspective that takes into consideration the human part of the network.
The study of the human element is a very distinctive aspect of the research, Pellegrino said. All the three research focus areas — named Risk, Detection and Agility — must remember the folks behind the cyber actions — human attackers, cyber defenders and end users.
Dr. Alexander Kott, ARL CISD associate director for science and technology, explains the 3 research areas this type.
The first area, Risk Research, seeks to develop theories and models for dynamic risk assessment and explores risk-related fundamental properties of dynamic cyber threats, Army networks, and defensive mechanisms.
The next, Detection Research, should shape cyber threat detection and popularity capabilities that inform approaches to rapid adaptation of a detection technique or algorithm as new cyber threats emerge at the battlefield, he said.
And finally, he said, Agility Research supports planning and control of cyber maneuvers, which can be how you can rapidly adjust our networks and defenses so as to defeat or mitigate cyber threats and effects.
“When we discuss a collaborative research alliance, one of the crucial key values of this mechanism is that we’re educating the tutorial community within the forms of problems and unique challenges that the military must have addressed,” Kott said. “We are influencing and guiding the research community toward developing research skills particular to that niche.”
Similar alliances exist on the lab for collaborative research in advanced electronic materials and materials in extreme dynamic environments, Kott said.
In the case of cybersecurity, ARL has had a robust internal program for years, partly to defend the military supercomputing resources. The ARL Supercomputing Research Center had a ribbon-cutting earlier this year to mark a diffusion and bigger high-performance in-house computing capability, Pellegrino added.
But new, evolving cyber challenges require a good deeper check out the inspiration of the issue. Technical leaders are preparing for the military of 2020 and beyond.
Future Army networks could be heterogeneous and convergent, comprising a wide selection of fixed wired networks, mobile cellular networks, and mobile ad-hoc networks, he said.
The dynamics, scale and complexity of Army networks coupled with evolving, advanced, persistent threats makes cybersecurity a grand challenge that can require multi-disciplinary experts working together, Pellegrino said.
Although we predict pockets of near-term results that shall we apply rapidly, this alliance is an extended-term commitment to laying a framework towards solutions into the longer term 10, 15, or even two decades away, he said.
The cybersecurity CRA is a critical ARL-CERDEC collaborative venture that seeks to seriously advance the state of cyber science with principles that result in rapid development of tools for home and abroad. The alliance has strong links to the military Cyber Strategy.
The Consortium Program Manager is Professor Patrick McDaniel of PSU.
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