DARPA Internet security initiative seeks to guarantee military safe, anonymous access to the Web -- including social networking

ARLINGTON, Va., 21 May 2010.Internet security experts at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., are asking industry to develop ways to guarantee the military safe and anonymous access to the Internet amid hostile attempts to disrupt government cyber communications.

DARPA released a broad agency announcement Thursday (DARPA-BAA-10-69) for the Safer Warfighter Communications (SAFER) program to develop technology that gives the military services safe, resilient Internet communications -- particularly to frustrate third-party attempts to identify and locate end users or block Internet communications.

DARPA wants industry to develop technology that also provides the quality of service to enable the government to use Internet services like instant messaging, e-mail, social networking, streaming video, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), and video conferencing.

The four-year SAFER program concerns any technologies that enable anonymous Internet communications to bypass techniques that suppress, localize, and/or corrupt information such as:

-- Internet protocol (IP)-address filtering or "blocking," typically by blacklisting the IP addresses of Websites or other services -- possibly by the network operator -- to deny the user access;

-- domain naming service (DNS) hijacking, redirecting a user to a different website or service from what the user intended, by supplying a false reply to the user's domain name resolution request; and

-- content filtering that captures and analyzes the content of the user's network traffic through deep packet inspection to check whether the traffic contains predefined signatures or sensitive keywords.

The DARPA SAFER program involves three technical areas of interest: ways to measure and evaluate the system; tools to overcome the suppression, localization, and corruption of Internet communications; and support to host the developed technology, provide configuration management, and use an existing server-side network test bed.

Companies interested should respond to DARPA by 6 July 2010, and the solicitation's final closing is 24 Nov. 2010.

DARPA's program manager for the SAFER initiative is Drew Dean, who can be reached by e-mail at [email protected] by fax at 703-516-8757, or by post at DARPA, ATTN: DARPA-BAA-10-69, 3701 North Fairfax Dr., Arlington, VA 22203-1714.

More information is online at https://www.fbo.gov/spg/ODA/DARPA/CMO/DARPA-BAA-10-69/listing.html.