Homeland Security Technologies on Their Way to Market

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The US Department of Homeland Security’s Transition to Practice office has helped make dozens of technologies developed by government labs or research partners commercially viable, including eight tools licensed by private companies, 15 tools piloted within government or the private sector, and five offered as open source code, said Program Manager Nadia Carlsten.

According to a blog on executiveiz.com, the projects include the following tools:

Akatosh was developed by government or its research partners with Homeland Security technology. Developed by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, Akatosh attempts to solve a cyber-security problem faced throughout the industry by taking regular “snapshots” of the state of every computer in an organization’s network, so that when a problem occurs, the picture is already there and can be compared to the state of the system before.

APE, an Android application developed by the nonprofit MITRE Corp. and federal funding, scans traffic to a phone and blocks anything incoming that is known to be malicious. This service is much faster in response to new threats than Android operating system security updates.

“The Policy Enforcement and Access Control for Endpoints, or PEACE, tool, developed with federal help at the Worchester Polytechnic Institute, is a central controller that requires permission from any computer in a network before it shares anything with another computer,” reports NextGov. The tool is capable of figuring out if the requests are coming from a person rather than a virus and applies a set of rules by the company, like not sharing links to likely malware.

The software is also smart enough to relax rules for conscientious employees that follow the protocols, while tightening them for vulnerable ones.