Cyberspace: The U.S. “Plan X”

This post is also available in: עברית (Hebrew)

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency leaders told lawmakers the agency is making progress with an ongoing cyber security project known as Plan X to increase cyber visibility and provide a new foundation for the fast-developing world of cyber warfare moving into the future. This according to Defense Tech.

“Plan X is a foundational cyber warfare program that we are building to allow us to have the visibility and the understanding of cyberspace so that we could start to deal with how cyber warfare is happening today and where it will be in the future,” DARPA director Arati Prabhaker told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Defense Subcommittee May 14. “We think it will be integral to the kinetic warfighting of the future.”

Prabhakar emphasized that cyber security needs to not only look at computers and networks but also address embedded systems. “One of our researchers a couple of years ago showed they could hack the speedometer on a car. All of our embedded military systems are also vulnerable. Everything has a computer in it today,” she said.

iHLS – Israel Homeland Security

Some of the language written into DARPA’s Plan X Broad Agency Announcement when launching the effort toward the end of 2012 indicates a desire to strengthen understanding of cyberspace through additional research.

“The military is seeking to measure, quantify, and understand cyberspace. The military’s current understanding and awareness in the cyber domain produces integration challenges with existing military capabilities in other domains. While existing technology can infer network topologies — how computers are connected to one another — using trace route, packet analysis, and other techniques, the current research is just beginning to try to answer specific questions about the cyber domain, ” the BAA states.