Vencore Labs to provide DARPA with technologies for secure information sharing using commercial smartphones

Vencore, Inc. of Chantilly, VA announced on Febuary 5 that its innovative research arm, Vencore Labs, Inc, was awarded a prime contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide technologies for new security models to support information sharing in tactical coalition environments using commercial handheld devices.  The contract is valued at $4.1 million for Phase 1 of the project and will be performed as part of DARPA’s Secure Handhelds on Assured Resilient networks at the tactical Edge (SHARE) program over the next three years.

The goal of the SHARE program is to develop technology that will enable information exchange between coalitions at multiple security classification levels on a handheld device. Vencore Labs will be helping design and develop VeriNet, Verifiably Secure NDN (Named Data Networking)-based Coalition Networks. The Vencore Labs team will use its research and implementation expertise to deliver VeriNet and enable secure information sharing groups between the US and its coalition partners.

Under the SHARE program, VeriNet will provide secure information sharing at multiple levels of security with an intuitive user interface at the tactical edge using commercial handheld devices, while minimizing the use of scarce handheld resources. The solution will also deliver secure tactical edge networking technologies based on NDN, an emerging new networking technique that provides packet-level security and high resilience to loss, adapted to the dynamic, highly mobile, and diverse tactical environment. Additionally, the Vencore Labs team will provide rapid deployment capabilities for coalitions with custom information sharing rules, while guaranteeing correctness of coalition configurations.

This new work builds on Vencore Labs’ research experience, technology expertise and implementation capabilities from prior related programs with DARPA and other agencies.

Source: Vencore