Army eyes autonomous cyber defenses, artificial intelligence, and machine learning for tactical networks

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND Md. – U.S. Army researchers are surveying the defense industry to find companies able to develop autonomous cyber defenses for tactical networks and communications that capitalize on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Officials of the Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., issued a request for information (W56KGU-19-R-AUTOCYBER) on Monday for the Autonomous Cyber project.

Researchers are looking for cyber technology to secure automated network decisions and defend against adaptive autonomous cyber attackers at machine speed.

The Army Contracting Command is conducting this industry survey on behalf of the Army Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center Space and Terrestrial Communications Directorate (S&TCD).

Overall, S&TCD envisions a combination of several artificial intelligence and machine learning products that deliver autonomous cyber defense capabilities. Specifically, researchers are looking for cyber and trusted computing enabling technologies for:

Related: Army surveys industry for the latest artificial intelligence research for cyber and electronic warfare

— autonomous detection and mitigation of known cyber vulnerabilities;

— ways to autonomously identify and correct misconfigurations in networks and hosts;

— ways to autonomously detect known and previously unknown malware samples;

— tools and methodologies for red team autonomous decision making engines;

— ways to improve robustness of autonomous decision engines to manipulate attackers;

— machine learning-based cyber agents tailored to specific tactical networks, data flows, and message sets that can detect and deduce the intent of an attack;

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— an interface that capitalizes on human in the loop feedback to autonomous decision engines to improve the performance and efficiency of human-machine teams; and

— new ways to correlate cyber response recommendations and generate a course of action based on available cyber tools and cyber events.

Companies interested should email 10-page white papers describing their technology test data no later than 13 Feb. 2019 to the Army’s Michael Dorsch at michael.e.dorsch.civ@us.army.mil.