Vencore Labs wins $4.8 million DARPA award for wireless network defense

Vencore, Inc. of Chantilly, VA announced July 1 that its applied research organization, Vencore Labs, was awarded a$4.8 million contract by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to protect wireless networks against attacks on the control plane, which includes the networking as well as the data link layers.

This work is the second phase of DARPA’s Wireless Network Defense (WND) program.  Vencore Labs was also an awardee on the first phase, which was focused on technology development. During Phase 2, the focus will be on applying technologies developed during Phase 1 to heterogeneous wireless networks that are relevant to the U.S. military.

“Securing wireless networks is incredibly complex and DARPA is renowned for attacking these types of hard-to-solve problems,” said Steve Omick, Ph.D., president of Vencore Labs. “Vencore Labs has decades of experience in working with these types of networks and finding solutions for the types of issues that they present.”

The primary focal points of Vencore Labs’ work include technologies for detecting network attacks, mitigating the impact of these attacks, and disseminating information about unreliable wireless network elements across the network so that other nodes can take appropriate defensive action.

Vencore Labs’ approach is notable in that its output will be applicable to multiple network technologies and be able to protect these disparate networks using a common defensive framework.   In addition, the Vencore Labs’ work will deliver a wireless defense framework that is robust in the face of attacks, has a very high accuracy rate, and imposes very little overhead on the network.

Source: Vencore