CHARLES RIVER ANALYTICS, INC. — Department of Homeland Security SBIR Phase I: H-SB012.1-002

Description

To defend against cyber adversaries, we need to disrupt the adversary's mission, so they no longer have the advantage. Because the battlefield in the cyber defense arena is a computing system under the defender's control, we have the opportunity to prepare the battlefield in a way that tilts the playing field towards us as the defender. Instead of providing a static target that can be probed and analyzed at the adversary's leisure, we need to provide a quickly moving and unpredictable target that allows only a narrow time window between adversary probe and attack. To enable a high performance moving target defense (MTD) system, we propose a framework that efficiently manages the continuous deployment of randomized software components to change the system's attack surface over time and evade threats. The innovative multikernel OS increases system performance and resilience and minimizes the impact of MTD on mission-critical tasks. The framework distributes components across the multikernel for easier maintenance. The MTD Framework (MTDF) schedules kernel updates to keep the attack surface dynamic while taking into account current usage patterns.