Monday, May 13, 2024
Monday, May 13, 2024
The Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, the team tasked by Defense Secretary Ash Carter with identifying innovative new technologies, recently provided a glimpse into areas where it plans to make future investments.
The team, which ended fiscal year 2016 with $36 million in prototyping contracts, listed three key areas in a report detailing its first quarterly results: multifactor authentication, cyber protection toolkits as well as micro-satellite and advanced analytics.
In an effort to address complex challenges facing the Defense Department's data access environment, "even when devices or credentials are lost," DIUx will invest in "one or more multifactor authentication technologies to prototype solutions to this problem," according to the team's report.
"Industry has recognized many of the challenges associated with legacy, single-factor authentication and identification systems, and a number of commercial solutions exist to reduce the risk of unauthorized data access and loss while increasing agility and integration," the report states.
Additionally, DIUx is "seeking software solutions for a deployable cyber incident response tool kit that offer the following capabilities: discovery, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, information sharing, and capturing lessons learned," the report states.
The cyber toolkit evaluation conducted by DIUx will be aligned with a larger effort conducted by U.S. Cyber Command in FY-17.
Meanwhile, "a growing number of firms in the U.S. ingest large volumes of satellite images and convert these datasets into insights through the use of advanced analytics and machine learning" and DOD is "considering leveraging commercial-based, micro-satellite technology capable of observing during the day, night, and all-weather conditions, such as synthetic aperture radar satellite technology, to complement existing capabilities," DIUx's report states.
The resulting imagery from such a micro-satellite payload would be "ingested" in a cloud-based computing systems to support "machine learning and object detection analysis," according to the report.