DARPA Selects Contractors For Self-Regenerative Systems Program

the next total war could take place in cyberspace within racks of computers across the world

Arlington (SPX) May 04, 2004
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected 11 research projects for funding under the Self-Regenerative Systems (SRS) program. Researchers will develop technologies for building military computing systems that provide critical functionality at all times, in spite of damage caused by unintentional errors or attacks. Pending final negotiations, individual contracts are expected to range between $815,000 and $1,350,000.

The SRS program will develop cognitive technologies enabling military systems to learn,regenerate themselves, and automatically improve their ability to deliver critical services. Selfregenerative systems will show a positive trend in reliability, actually exceeding initial operating capability and approaching a theoretical optimal performance level over long time intervals.

SRS technology will make possible advanced military systems that remain potent for extended deployment periods even in the face of sophisticated and sustained attack. The program is envisioned to last 18 months.

To achieve the SRS program goals, the program will address four key technology areas:

� Biologically Inspired Diversity. In this technical area, the program will reduce the leverage available to adversaries by generating many variants of a system component that perform the same desired functions but are sufficiently different in their vulnerabilities so that a single attack can only damage a small part of an entire system. Two projects were selected in this area: University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va.; and Global Infotek Inc., Reston, Va.

� Cognitive Immunity and Regeneration. The goal in this technical area is to develop cognitive techniques that introspect about a system's operation, that recognize damage resulting from successful attack, and that reason about appropriate countermeasures. Through such techniques, the program will build systems that automatically recover and regenerate their operational capability, even in the face of continuing attack. Four projects were selected in this area: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Mass. (three projects selected); and Honeywell Labs, Minneapolis, Minn.

SPACEWAR

New Marking Process Traces Spammers, Pirates And Hackers

University Park - Apr 01, 2004
Penn State researchers have proposed a new marking process for Internet messages to make it easier to trace the originators of spam, illegal copyrighted material or a virus attack. The new marking scheme produced less than one percent false positives per 1000 attacking addresses in simulated distributed denial of service attacks and even fewer false positives and zero missed detections tracing addresses transferring copyrighted material in another simulation.