DARPA

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has started taking applications to develop a stronger defense against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The idea of the program, called Extreme DDoS Defense (XD3), is to create a countermeasures system that is not only more nimble in thwarting an attack, but also able to quickly recognize when an attack is developing so it can establish a proper defense.

One goal is to have a response time of 10 seconds or less, but that would be under ideal conditions and dependent upon the level of the attack.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) kicked off a program seeking ways to convert existing large aircraft into drone carriers that could launch waves of unmanned aircraft a safe distance from a target to carry out a mission and then recover them—all while in flight. DARPA issued a request for information (RFI) kicking off the program November 7.

Talk about finding a needle in a haystack.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it wants to develop sophisticated code that can find faults in key algorithms used to anchor major software packages that for example implement hash tables or conduct password checks.

The U.S. Department of Defense may have found a new way to scan millions of lines of software code for vulnerabilities, by turning the practice into a set of video games and puzzles and having volunteers do the work.

Having gamers identify potentially problematic chunks of code could help lower the work load of trained vulnerability analysts by "an order of magnitude or more," said John Murray, a program director in SRI International's computer science laboratory who helped create one of the games, called Xylem.

DARPA has created the Wireless Network Defense program, which aims to develop new protocols that enable military wireless networks to remain operational despite inadvertent misconfigurations or malicious compromise of individual nodes.

“Current security efforts focus on individual radios or nodes, rather than the network, so a single misconfigured or compromised radio could debilitate an entire network,” said Wayne Phoel, DARPA program manager.

 The Department of Defense is pulling the plug on Cyber Fast Track, a program aimed at tapping reformed hackers and other security hotshots to solve cyber-defense problems quickly.

Looking to circumvent the typical onerous, long-term process of funding grants, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) used the program to improve the government’s ability to keep up with fast-moving bad actors on the cybercriminal stage.

The scenario is one that information security experts dread: widespread dissemination of commercial technology that is secretly wired to function in unintended ways or even spy on its users. From this vantage point, mobile phones, network routers, computer work stations and any other device hooked up to a network can provide a point of entry for an adversary.

For the U.S. Department of Defense this issue is even more of a concern now than ever before as DoD personnel rely on equipment bought in large quantities and built with components manufactured all over the world.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) opened up registration for the FANG Challenges, a set of three next-generation military vehicle design competitions that will kick off in January, and will put tools based on approaches borrowed from software development and chip design in the hands of teams of engineers and designers. In an effort to reinvent how such complex systems are designed and built, DARPA is preparing for the first real test of its efforts to use open-source software and Web collaboration—with millions of dollars in prize money at stake.