IARPA posts HECTOR BAA

On September 29, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) posted the broad agency announcement for its HECTOR program (IARPA-BAA-17-05). Proposals are due by 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on December 1.

This BAA (IARPA-BAA-17-05) is for the HECTOR Program.  IARPA is seeking innovative solutions for the HECTOR Program in this BAA.  The HECTOR Program is envisioned to begin May 2018 and end by April 2023.

The goal of the HECTOR program is to build a framework that enables the development of a broad spectrum of secure distributed applications that use advanced cryptographic techniques. The HECTOR program seeks to develop a comprehensive set of design tools, programming languages, and verification tools to:

• Enable application developers to leverage new and existing cryptographic computing concepts in their software, while minimizing the cryptographic expertise required of the application developers;
• Enable developers to explore the space of secure distributed applications, and explore possible compositions of different cryptographic techniques, while getting feedback on the feasibility and performance of such applications and compositions given the currently known protocols, and on the resources that would be consumed by them;
• Enable the system architect / developer / data owner to be able to express the security and privacy properties and operational environment as desired properties of the system;
• And through the development of those tools enable advances in the security and performance of systems using advanced cryptographic techniques.

For existing approaches to data processing, compliance and access are competing requirements. Advanced cryptographic techniques have the potential to protect data in process, and limit access to the information according to policy controls. This raises the possibility of developing distributed applications to allow mutually distrusting parties, operating on untrusted computing platforms, to collaborate on a shared computation for a result that all can trust. While solutions exist to protect data at rest and in transit, protection for data being processed is not widely available or deployed, which hinders opportunities for collaboration between mutually distrusting parties. In particular, verifiable computation techniques can add assurance as to the correctness of the results produced by a system, even when the software and/or hardware is provided by an external party.

HECTOR is expected to drive innovation in using and implementing cryptographic protocols, as well as in the secure data services that can be built on the foundation of those protocols.

Full information is available here.

Source: FedBizOpps