DARPA boost its investment in cyber research 50 percent

DARPA

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced that it's to boost its investment in cyber research by 50 percent over the next five years, in response to the increasing threat of cyber warfare.
Our responsibility is to acknowledge and prepare to protect the nation in this new environment," says DARPA director Regina Dugan.

Over the past 20 years, says DARPA, the effort and cost of information security software has grown exponentially — from software packages with thousands of lines of code to ones with nearly 10 million. DARPA's now recruited a cyber team composed of experts, including 'white hat' hackers. “I should emphasize that national policymakers, not DARPA, will determine how cyber capabilities will be employed to protect and defend the national security interests of the United States," says Dugan. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, birthplace of the Internet, plans to increase its spending on cyber research 50% over the next five years, and will increasingly focus on offensive cyber capabilities as well as defensive capabilities, agency director Regina Dugan said Monday.

"Modern warfare will demand the effective use of cyber, kinetic, and combined cyber and kinetic means," Dugan said, speaking before the DARPA Cyber Colloquium, a gathering of cyber professionals. "We need more options, we need more speed, and we need more scale. We must both protect its peaceful shared use as well as prepare for hostile cyber acts that threaten our military capabilities." Monday's speech was the first time that Dugan has publicly discussed DARPA's offensive cyber research, according to a DARPA spokesman. For example, Army Cyber Command director Lt. Gen. Rhett Hernandez called for "cyber warriors" who could "operationalize cyberspace" with a "full range of cyber capabilities," including offensive capabilities.

Dugan and other speakers echoed the idea that the current approach of layering security technology upon security technology will not resolve the problem, but will only result in more complexity. The Pentagon's advanced research arm said Monday it is boosting efforts to build offensive cyber arms for possible keyboard-launched U.S. military attacks against enemy targets. The military needs "more and better options" to meet cyber threats to a growing range of industrial and other systems controlled by computers vulnerable to penetration, including cars, Regina Dugan, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told a first-of-its kind conference.

"Modern warfare will demand the effective use of cyber, kinetic and combined cyber and kinetic means," she said. Dugan's agency, known as DARPA, opened the session to what it called "visionary hackers" as well as academics and others in an effort to "change the dynamic of cyber defense" amid mounting U.S. concern over vulnerabilities of networks and computer-controlled hardware. DARPA's mission is to maintain the U.S. military's technology edge and prevent a high-tech surprise by sponsoring high-payoff research with military applications.

"Malicious cyber attacks are not merely an existential threat to our bits and bytes. They are a real threat to our physical systems, including our military systems," Dugan said. The DARPA budget request for fiscal 2012, which began October 1, called for its cyber research funding to jump more than 73 percent to $208 million from $120 million. U.S. officials have declined to discuss publicly U.S. offensive capabilities in cyberspace. James Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for policy, told a separate event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the United States had a "full spectrum of cyber capabilities," by implication including existing cyber weapons.