Cyberspace is an unconstrained interaction space enabled by the convergence of multiple disciplines, technologies and global networks. It is also an emerging battlespace in which the Navy must exercise information dominance—total control of information and knowledge in transit, at rest and in processing—while denying these capabilities to an adversary.
Cybersecurity is an essential component of information dominance in cyberspace, and a major research focus for the Office of Naval Research. The Information Dominance and Cybersecurity program investigates information security issues, starting from the root of most security breaches, with the goal of achieving robustness and correctness of the underlying hardware and software of the system itself, minimizing potential attack surfaces. Interaction among computer processes within the network as well as between users and computers are weak links in cyber security.
The program also addresses this weakness through the trusted networked computer thrust and the secure information management, sharing and interaction thrust. It probes the foundation and methodology for evaluating security properties of cyberspace’s protocols and processes to better measure, verify and assess the collective security of cyberspace.
By exploring the methodology and technology for assuring cyber physical information integrity and trust boundary among networked, the program tightly interacts and cooperates physical and computing devices as part of the Navy cyber infrastructure. Looking into the future to a candidate for replacing current underlying cyberspace technology, this program is also investing quantum information science for computation and communication. The quantum processing thrust promises techniques that potentially offer a more secure system.