[Infowarrior] - Cyberwarfare: Darpa's New 'Space Race'

[Richard Forno]

Cyberwarfare: Darpa's New 'Space Race'
By Sharon Weinberger EmailMay 01, 2008 | 4:10:00 PMCategories: DarpaWatch,
Info War, Training and Sims

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/05/the-pentagon-wa.html

The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, was created 50 years
ago, in response to the Soviets' launch of Sputnik. In less than a year,
Darpa put together the infrastructure that guided the American space effort
for decades to come. Now, Darpa has been given new marching orders: to help
America fight and win battles online.

Under a directive signed by the President -- and OK'd by Congress -- nearly
every arm of the government's security apparatus is starting work on a
massive national cybersecurity initiative, designed to protect the United
States from electronic attack (and strike at adversaries online, as well).
Darpa's role: Create a cyberwarfare range where all these new forms of
electronic combat can be tried out.  According to a defense official
familiar with the program: "Congress has given DARPA a direct order; that's
only happened once before -- with the Sputnik program in the '50s."

Danger Room's sister blog, Threat Level, has a good writeup of the
cybersecurity initiative, which has been labeled as a Manhattan Project-type
effort (a similar label was used for the Pentagon's work against IEDs,
though it's not clear the parallel is as real as some might hope). In the
case of cybersecurity, there is at least talk of big money: about $30
billion, Danger Room is told.

For its part, Darpa's "National Cyber Range" would create a virtual
environment where the Defense Department can mock real warfare, both defense
and offense.

Darpa today issued an announcement, describing how the range would be a test
where the government could:

    € Conduct unbiased, quantitative and qualitative assessment of
information assurance and survivability tools in a representative network
environment.
    € Replicate complex, large-scale, heterogeneous networks and users in
current and future Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems and
operations.
    € Enable multiple, independent, simultaneous experiments on the same
infrastructure.
    € Enable realistic testing of Internet/Global-Information-Grid (GIG)
scale research.
    € Develop and deploy revolutionary cyber testing capabilities.
    € Enable the use of the scientific method for rigorous cyber testing.

This is clearly a serious deal for the agency: Darpa Director Tony Tether is
a scheduled speaker at the proposers' day workshop scheduled for mid-May,
and apparently plans to help handpick the contractors (Tether is known for
his close involvement in Darpa contracts, but this level of detail is
apparently somewhat unusual, we're told).

It also looks like many of the details surrounding this program will be
classified.