IARPA launches VirTUE program

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, announced on March 20 the launch of the Virtuous User Environment—“VirtUE”—program to improve the way users interact with their daily computers to protect an organization from cloud-based security vulnerabilities.

“The commercial cloud and the numerous innovative technologies that it is spawning offers computer security professionals the ability to recreate a user environment that is fundamentally more secure than current workstation and virtual desktop offerings while still being accessible and affordable,” says IARPA program manager Kerry Long.

The goal of VirtUE is to create a user environment that is far more resilient to current phishing and web-based attacks. VirtUE will seek to reduce security engineering costs by enabling collaboration and the instant sharing of user security environments among organizations. All documentation and software that is produced by VirtUE performers will be released as open source products, supporting Intelligence Community-wide transparency efforts.

Through a competitive Broad Agency Announcement process, IARPA has selected four performance teams led by Raytheon BBN, Siege Technologies, Star Labs, and Next Century. Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory is serving as the Test and Evaluation advisor. The first phase of the program will run through May 2019.

Source: IARPA