IARPA Searches for Cyber Attack Prediction
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is looking for a few good ideas. The organization’s Office for Anticipating Surprise has initiated a competition for its Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment (CAUSE) program, which aims at discovering ways to anticipate cyber attacks before they occur.
IARPA officials explain that industry has invested heavily in solutions that analyze the effects of cyber attacks rather than capabilities to analyze and mitigate their causes. As a result, today’s approaches typically focus on post-mortem analysis of the various attack vectors. However, as attacks have evolved and increased, these methods do not adequately enable cybersecurity practitioners to prevent attacks.
The CAUSE program’s purpose is to develop cyber attack forecasting methods to detect emerging cyber phenomena and enable cyberdefenders to prevent full-blown attacks. It aims to develop and validate unconventional multi-disciplined sensor technology to complement existing advanced intrusion detection capabilities. Anticipated innovations include methods to manage and extract huge amounts of streaming and batch data, applications of new and existing features from other disciplines to the cyber domain and new models that generate warnings of future cyber events.
IARPA is the research arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. For additional information about CAUSE, contact Robert Rahmer at dni-iarpa-baa-15-06@iarpa.gov.
