Air Force Research Lab issues Avionics Vulnerability Assessment Mitigation and Protection (AVAMP) BAA

On April 1, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) issued a broad agency announcement for the Avionics Vulnerability Assessment Mitigation and Protection (AVAMP)

research program (Solicitation Number: BAA-RQKS-2015-0008).  AFRL expects to issue an RFP for this program within 60 days.

The Avionics Vulnerability Mitigation branch (AFRL/RYWA) in the Sensors Directorate conducts basic and applied research and advanced development to understand and improve cyber security of U.S. Air Force platforms and weapon systems operating in contested cyber domain. The activity involves understanding the threat to legacy and future weapon systems, discovering, characterizing, and mitigating cyber vulnerabilities and developing protections against cyber-attack to provide fight-through capability.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) solicits innovative research proposals to address these needs and to integrate, test, and evaluate developed technologies into the AFRL AVAMP embedded system cyber research platform. Performers under this activity will advance the state-of-the-art in embedded system cyber security offering novel and innovative approaches to understand and defeat advanced cyber threats and protect our systems so they operate as intended and provide mission assurance to the commander.
The objective of this research program is to investigate and develop methodologies, tools, techniques, and capabilities to identify susceptibilities and mitigate vulnerabilities in avionics systems and to protect the avionics against cyber-attack. Responsive research
will explore new and emerging concepts related to development, integration, assessment, evaluation, and demonstration of embedded system cyber security technologies. Attack vectors of interest include physical, remote, and supply chain access.

For this solicitation, avionics is defined to include both manned and remotely piloted vehicles, on-board Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems, munitions, and any equipment, component, or subsystem that could compromise mission assurance of the Air Force weapon system. Mitigation and protection techniques and solutions developed under this program are expected to interface and interoperate with anti-tamper and open

avionics system architectures and be applied to a wide-range of associated platforms and in contested environments including but not limited to, electronic warfare systems, space systems, and mobile devices.

Identified technical challenges to accomplish objectives include, but are not limited to, (1) developing automated tools to support avionics vulnerability assessments, (2) developing automated reverse engineering, program understanding and software assurance tools to identify and detect weaknesses in avionics software/firmware/hardware, (3) developing malware detection tools and countermeasures, and (4) developing techniques to detect, respond and adapt to never-before-seen attacks in operationally relevant time scales.

AFRL seeks and encourages small business participation through teaming arrangements and/or as performers on individual task and subtask research activities.

The full text of the notice is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps