BBN Technologies

The Designing Protection and Adaptation into a Survivability Architecture (DPASA) project involves the design, development, and validation of a survivability architecture that defends a distributed and networked system against sustained and sophisticated cyber-attacks (as from a nationstate adversary). Specifically, DPASA will use the Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI), a command-and-control system developed by the U.S. Air Force as an exemplar to demonstrate how DoD applications and systems can be made highly resilient when under cyber attack. DPASA aims to achieve a new high watermark in the design of survivable distributed systems by combining protection measures, detection mechanisms, and adaptive responses.

After winning the competitive-design phase, BBN is implementing the survivability architecture and instantiating the survivable version of the JBI exemplar for testing. The resulting system will incorporate an array of state-of-the-art protection mechanisms in a redundant and heterogeneous design that includes distributed firewalls, smart cards, security-enhanced operating systems and virtual machines, and sophisticated intrusion detection and correlation mechanisms. Also, it will feature a range of autonomic and human-supported adaptive responses.