KNOWMADICS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: X224-ODCSO2

Description

The Department of the Air Force (AFSOC, ACC, DAF-ICO), along with almost all other services (e.g., USASOC, NSWC), have a national Defense-related mission need in the area of vulnerability assessment and Counterintelligence (CI) mitigations for Department of Defense interests. Specifically, establishing and maintaining confidence that our security infrastructure is not subject to any unknown weaknesses / vulnerabilities or foreign interference is absolutely fundamental for US Forces and our allies to maintain a dominant posture over near-peer adversaries and foreign actors. A solution to objectively assess the vulnerabilities of DOD facilities and where the DOD has interests will help to provide the assurance that is desperately needed as foreign competitors are actively posturing to inject themselves into our developmental pathways wherever possible to create the potential to disrupt our information, logistic, and technology advantages. These assessments will inform investments in countermeasures to detect or mitigate attack vectors targeting identified vulnerabilities resulting in comprehensive risk reduction. To address this need, a multi-layered network characterization and multidiscipline vulnerability assessment (MDVA) approach is required given the complexity of modern facilities and the infrastructure and systems that exist to protect and secure them. To begin to address this problem, Knowmadics, Inc. (KMI) proposes a Phase II effort to prototype, test, and evaluate the Signature Investigation and Characterization Kit for Layered Exploitation (SICKLE). SICKLE will enable US Forces with a portable and turnkey solution for conducting discreet, repeatable, and robust network characterization and MDVA of a facility’s external IoT surveillance and security measures and RF patterns of life (PoL). SICKLE will provide the critical first layer of the necessary multi-layered site characterization to address a desperately needed capability to: (i) characterize a site’s layered defense vulnerabilities; (ii) establish the broader vulnerabilities characterization of DoD capability dependencies; and (iii) inform necessary measures or mitigations to achieve the facility security necessary to protect US Forces and our interests. SICKLE will be designed and prototyped as an adaptation to enhance KMI's TRL 9 360 Aware commercial product, that has over 350 active users at the time of this writing. Leveraging our team's deep technical and TTP expertise in electronic warfare, information warfare, and multi-discipline network characterization, we will pursue a Phase II effort focused on: (1) prototyping the MVP SICKLE solution; (2) defining repeatable TTPs for conducting RF spectrum usage, PoL, and IoT surveillance and security device characterization using SICKLE; and (3) refinement of SICKLE through increasingly complex T&E demonstration events at confederated real-world facilities representative of those found in commercial and military supply chains.