Arkham Technology Limited — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N222-124

Description

Small un-crewed Navy platforms, such as Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), Unmanned Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) and Unmanned Airborne Vehicles (UAVs), have extreme Size, Weight, and Power (SWaP) constraints. The encryptors they use to protect their Data-at-Rest (D@R) and Data-in-Transit (DiT) must shrink to meet upcoming needs, however, many of the existing End Cryptographic Units (ECUs) certified by the National Security Agency (NSA) are too large and powerful for future platforms.  In addition, in order to be certified by NSA, all new cryptographic designs must meet the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) new CryptoMod2 requirements, with which few, if any, existing cryptographic components currently comply. Our solution for the Navy addresses these issues with a “solve once and scale” mindset. Arkham Technology has the credentials and specialized environment to develop and certify a new high-assurance cryptographic device for the Navy.  In addition, we have TRL-9 cryptologic Intellectual Property (IP) products that can be reused in the design to reduce risk.  Furthermore, we have designed innovative CryptoMod2 technologies under previous SBIR Phase II efforts. We will leverage these capabilities to provide the Navy a small ECU device to secure the sensitive data on unattended devices. Our solution supports both network-based D@R and DiT in applications with limited bandwidth or intermittent connectivity.  We support loading NSA keys manually, however, we also provide automated KMI-aware key and certificate management without operator intervention over very limited bandwidth and intermittent connectivity.  In addition, our solution turns the Navy’s sensors into Internet of Battlefield Things (IoBT) with an encrypted and authenticated interface to the Navy’s IL-6 classified cloud computing infrastructure, allowing tighter integration between the Navy’s sensor data and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) analytics for real-time expert decision-making.