NSA Information Assurance Research

1
NSA Information Assurance Research

• Grant Wagner
• June 7, 2005

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Research Model

• Emphasis on in-house research
• support with competitive contracts
• mostly applied (6.2, 6.3), some basic (6.1)
• 3 - 5 year time horizon
• Solutions for customer mission
• Tech Transfer
• internal (IAD), external (Domestic Tech Transfer)
• leverage partnerships
• Sophisticated threat
• expert, motivated, well funded
• High assurance goal
• increased sharing/increased risk
• No business case for industry/COTS

3
Government Partners

• Collaboration with ARDA, NSF DARPA
• Cross Program Coordination/Consulting
• BAA Proposal reviews, joint funding
• Support to National Coordination Office (IT RD)
• Founder/Member INFOSEC Research Council
• Support to NIST for Cryptography Standards
• NIAP Partner

4
Research VisionUbiquitous Secure Collaboration
(USC)

• New techniques and technology to provide the
  ubiquitous and transparent security necessary to
  enable our customers to operate as
  network-centric, multi-domain, collaborative
  enterprises.

5
Transparency

• Creating an intelligent, secure, flexible and
  self-protecting global infrastructure to
  IA-provision critical end units.

Plug Play, Auto secure over the
Internet, Transparent authentication
6
Mobility

• Enabling our customers to transit and/or tolerate
  a hostile environment to do business outside the
  traditional secure enclave

Universal adaptor Jabbertalky, Location-specific
policy
7
High Assurance Platform

• Create the capability to trust software to
  perform security-critical functions traditionally
  reserved for hardware

Containment, attestation MSL, type-1 software VPNs
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Controlled Sharing

• Enable sharing of information across diverse
  domains from National Security through
  unclassified open systems through robust
  protection mechanisms.

Agile Communities of Interest Secure virtual
infrastructure
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Hardening Critical Networks

• Creating technology to secure critical
  enterprises against malicious activity and the
  insider threat, treating our own networks as a
  worked example

Secure, reconfigurable enterprise containment
architecture BOXTop
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Confidentiality

• Cryptographic algorithms and engineering required
  to protect the content of information systems.

1 Tb/sec crypto, next generation algorithms 10
Giga-bit encryptor, Photonics
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Product Assurance

• Methodology, tools and technology, which can
  enable the IAD to develop and deploy
  high-assurance products using standard commercial
  resources.

Domain-specific language (Cryptol), High
Assurance w/o Trusted Developers
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Enhanced Defensive Information Operations

• Develop advanced techniques that can detect,
  characterize, and/or react to cyber attacks
  against DoD and IC information systems.

Latency applications Connection analysis