Physical Optics Corporation — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: OSD153-004

Description

To address the OSDs need for a network defense technology based upon dynamic adaptation of a network or an intruders perception of it, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes a new Fast Network Information Scrambling Technology (FIST). FIST is based on an innovative low-complexity network information scrambler algorithm implemented on low-cost small-scale commercial off-the-shelf hardware components. FIST technology is designed to protect the network from intrusion by rapidly changing the network structure as perceived by the adversary; consequently, the attackers work factor increases dramatically with no impact on maintaining network operations. FISTs ability to thwart an adversarys network reconnaissance, attack, and compromise attempts directly addresses OSDs requirements. Key contributions of FIST are its transparency with respect to network operations, compliance with existing network standards, protocol-agnostic behavior, low complexity, and low-cost operation. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of FIST by creating a representative protected network in a laboratory environment, implementing key software components and demonstrating FISTs capability to rapidly change the perceived network structure. In Phase II, POC plans to develop a full-scale prototype reaching TRL-6, which will demonstrate that FIST can be deployed efficiently at a large scale and effectively protect enterprise-level networks from intrusions.