Notice ID: HR001124S0037
PWND² will develop formal models of emergent communication pathways to fundamentally improve how we deploy and detect robust and resilient hidden networks in the real world. The program will pair software-defined networking approaches with formal methods to provide provable privacy and performance guarantees for hidden communication systems at meaningful scale.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative proposals in the technical areas of software defined networking, formal methods, and privacy to develop technologies that provide provable guarantees for hidden communications systems. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.
Hidden communication systems (HCSs) are an essential element to national security and the internet freedom community. However, despite the importance of HCSs in our national security posture and open communication worldwide, prevailing HCS design methodologies are inadequate. Modern HCS development remains a manual process; systems are designed with ad hoc techniques, validated via empirical testing, and deployed without any guarantees that users will remain hidden.
The current approach has several drawbacks. First, it is slow and uncertain – it is a manual search of a complex design space, tuned to an understanding of the state of the network at a particular time despite inevitable changes in the network. Second, the current approach only provides temporary advantages over the adversary – once a technique is identified by the adversary, the community must return to the slow, manual task of designing new privacy techniques. Third, it encourages use of individual, static techniques in isolation, because each is a bespoke capability, implemented in a vacuum.
Once HCS networks are constructed, their properties are measured and validated via expensive empirical testing and analysis. These tests have difficulty capturing the range of esoteric, real-world network environments, and would require infeasible amounts of at-scale testing to assess functionality across that range …
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