DARPA’s Edge-CT program to protect Military WANs from Cyber Attacks and Network Errors on the Fly

The United States military is heavily dependent on networked communication to fulfill its missions. The wide-area network (WAN) infrastructure that supports this communication is vulnerable to a wide range of failures and cyber attacks that can severely impair connectivity and mission effectiveness at critical junctures. Examples include inadvertent or malicious misconfiguration of network devices, hardware and software failures, extended delays in Internet Protocol (IP) route convergence, denial of service (DoS) flooding attacks, and a variety of control-plane and data-plane attacks resulting from malicious code embedded within network devices.

Defense Information Systems Agency’s 2014 — 2019 Strategic Plan has set a strategic goal to evolve the Joint Information Environment. It involves evolving a consolidated, collaborative, and secure joint information environment, enabling end-to-end information sharing and interdependent enterprise services across the Department that are seamless, interoperable, efficient, and responsive to joint and coalition Warfighter requirements. It shall be achieved by Normalizing Networks with common standards with the intent to eliminate excess redundancy and legacy non- Internet Protocol (IP) services to create a unified capabilities, everything over IP meshed transport infrastructure.