AF seeks security solutions with kill chain integration, spectrum awareness
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Through a recently issued broad agency announcement, the Air Force is seeking to address kill chain integration and full spectrum awareness of emerging threats.
The Air Force is inviting industry to help it boost security through kill chain integration and full spectrum awareness of emerging threats.
In a new broad agency announcement, the Air Force is taking aim at Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James’s “Bending the Cost Curve” initiative announced at the beginning of last year by working with industry to develop a better understanding of objectives and threshold requirements and rapidly address the need for kill chain integration solutions.
In typical military parlance, the term “kill chain” refers to the lengthy process of identifying and thwarting threats, typically from reconnaissance, until the threat is eliminated. This term also applies to threats in cyberspace and to the spectrum – identifying and eliminating intrusions in the networks.
The Air Force is interested in two specific areas of research. The first seeks research in providing operationally focused intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities that meet requirements for combatant commanders as well as end users. Capabilities under this research area could include:
- ISR modernization
- Enhancing situational awareness
- Mobile networking and communications equipment
- Improvements to existing AF/DOD infrastructure
- Air Force cryptographic operations modernization
- Geospatial analysis of social media
- Exploitation of enemy threat systems
- Increasing data utility and accessibility
The Air Force also wants information on networks and IT systems with agile mechanisms that can detect, monitor, assess and isolate insider threats. These systems must be able to restore contaminated systems to “pristine trusted states.” The BAA included the following network capabilities:
- Address IT system security that uses virtualization coupled with both manual and machine learning techniques.
- Act autonomously to assess the probability of a function’s trustworthiness, allowing trusted functions on the network and disabling untrusted ones.
- Provide solutions for automated and/or manual mechanisms capable of restoring IT systems with minimal disruption to users.
- Counter the insider threats with morphing attack services for both client and server hosts.
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