The Expeditionary Cyber program provides the Navy and U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) innovative solutions to defend their assets and defeat adversaries within and through cyberspace. Traditional cyber solutions are tethered to enterprise infrastructures, and oftentimes are housed in permanent, controlled rooms. Expeditionary Cyber solutions must contribute to the enterprise infrastructure, but decouple quickly to operate either in standalone configurations or as part of a distributed, mobile tactical operation in harsh and unfriendly environments.
Research for the Expeditionary Cyber program encompasses DoD S&T activities from fundamental research to advanced technology development. This program seeks to gain knowledge about computing systems, data and networks encountered in expeditionary environments in order to devise new applications for Naval operations. The program seeks to expand emerging applications towards a broad expeditionary need related to cyberspace that presents initial feasibility of a warfighting capability. Innovative solutions that show initial promise will be refined into a prototype that performs in an operationally relevant environment.
Research Concentration Areas
- Black-box radio-frequency fuzzing
- Hardware-accelerated vulnerability analysis
- Network traffic inference and redirection protection
- Digital supply chain integrity
- Remote side-channel attacks and verification
- Embedded Security
- Wireless Security
- Software Security
- Moving Target Defense approaches
- RF chain cybersecurity
- Sensor-aided precision, navigation, and timing cybersecurity
- Vehicle cybersecurity
Research Challenges and Opportunities
- Tools that can quickly automate the classification, exploitability, and if necessary triage, the hardware, firmware and software layers of fielded systems in a non-destructive manner
- Tools that can provide dynamic cyber risk assessments for distributed computing architectures and explainable computer-assisted mitigations
- Sufficient characterization of networks and traffic with passive analytics or low computational load
- Dynamic computing architectures that translate mission functions in formally verified expected manner
- Tools to simplify program semantics for warfighter understanding
- Non-invasive discovery of cyber threats
How to Submit
For detailed application and submission information for this research topic, please refer to our broad agency announcement (BAA) No. N0001425SB001.
Contracts: All white papers and full proposals for contracts must be submitted through FedConnect; instructions are included in the BAA.
Grants: All white papers for grants must be submitted through FedConnect, and full proposals for grants must be submitted through grants.gov; instructions are included in the BAA.