5G communications, machine learning, gamification of training, and training autonomous systems are just a few of the technology areas the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is adopting or will need to adopt to ensure the warfighters of tomorrow are ready to achieve their missions.
Every day, CACI research scientists and engineers identify emerging topics that merit further exploration to develop technologies and solutions on these and many other topics to support the U.S. armed forces organizations as they strive to maintain national security.
Between November 29 and December 7, 2021, no fewer than 10 technical experts from CACI’s Cyberspace Operations, Research & Engineering Laboratory (CORE Lab) will deliver technical sessions and results of their research to U.S. military officials and related audiences attending major defense industry conferences.
Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference
At the upcoming I/ITSEC event, a team in the CORE Lab’s Internet and Cybersecurity Research Department with advanced know-how in how modeling and simulations techniques can support high-fidelity training scenarios will give a tutorial to provide attendees with an understanding of telecommunications and cyber networks, and how they can support multi-domain military operations.
The 2021 conference, the world's largest modeling, simulation, and training event, will be held November 29-December 2 at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida. Steven Kropac, Paul Davis, Philip Lamoureux, Patrick Lawrence, and Dan Wojciechowski will present "5G Fundamentals – What is a Commercial 5G Network and How Does My Handset Attach to It” Monday, November 29 at 12:45 pm in Room 320C.
Kropac, the vice president leading CORE Lab's Internet and Cybersecurity Research Department, will explain with his co-presenters to the I/ITSEC audience of U.S. military and modeling and simulation professionals that as our world becomes increasingly connected and 5G becomes more ubiquitous, a foundational understanding of commercial mobile network technology is necessary for experts and non-experts alike to understand everyday cyber activities and how cybersecurity protects networks.
“We also will educate the I/ITSEC audience on the basics of mobile network technology, and how simulation systems build a broad and deep understanding of cybersecurity scenarios in modern 5G mobile network environments,” Kropac said.
Military Communications Conference 2021
Lloyd Greenwald, the vice president leading the CORE Lab’s Advanced Cyber Science Department, studies how to use machine learning defensively to track what parties of interest are doing as well as understand the vulnerabilities of machine learning, including adversarial attacks. His most recent research sought to gain deeper understanding of a classical defense to adversarial attacks — the “moving target defense” — as applied to machine learning.
“In a cyber system that an adversary is trying to attack, they may think a system looks like A,” Greenwald said. “So we make it look like A but configure it to be B so that adversary attacks intended for A will fail. Techniques we can use include shuffling code across system memory so it doesn’t appear where the adversary thinks it will. For a machine learning system, we can change the parameters of the machine learning model so that the attacker tries to attack model A, but the system is using model B.”
Greenwald’s session, “Toward Effective Moving Target Defense Against Adversarial AI,” will take place at the MILCOM 2021 conference on December 1 at 3:45 pm at the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina in room Pacific 23. Jian Fan, Taejin Kim, Peter Martin, and Konrad Vesey are Greenwald's co-authors on the paper.
Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Worldwide Conference
For nearly 20 years, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has hosted an annual gathering of experts and innovators from across the DoD, Intelligence Community, industry, and academia at DoDIIS Worldwide. The 2021 theme, Foresight 20/20: Building a New Digital Ecosystem, emphasizes the urgent race to discover and adopt innovative solutions to maintain a competitive strategic advantage over our adversaries. This year’s event will take place December 5-8 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.
Dan Bono, Executive Director of the CORE Lab’s Cyber Mission Operations Department, and CORE Lab's Senior Vice President Dr. Kevin McNeill will present “Training Autonomous Systems with Synthetic Data Sets” Monday, December 6 at 1:00 pm in Room 4.
Bono says autonomous systems require training data sets that will be challenging to build.
“The machines are on the rise, but they still can’t figure out how to cut your lawn and not your neighbor’s lawn,” Bono said. “Modeling, simulation and digital twins could help us rapidly create virtual reality synthetic data sets to train autonomous systems and improve the trustworthiness of autonomous capabilities.”
CACI will send a second team of speakers to DoDIIS with expertise in virtual reality environments as an approach to train professionals responsible for protecting critical infrastructure and commercial systems from disruptions such as cyberattacks and natural disasters.
Making a game out of serious training exercises does more than adding fun to the learning process. Gamification has increased training audience engagement, performance, and satisfaction throughout the DoD by applying game mechanics to self-paced, individual training events.
“However, applying this approach to complex cybersecurity systems is difficult because cybersecurity concepts can be complex, abstract, and in some cases esoteric,” explains Chris Miranda, CACI's vice president leading the CORE Lab’s Telecommunications Studies Department.
Scott Thompson, an ICS/SCADA systems engineer in CORE Lab's Telecommunications Studies Department, says securing the technology that runs our nation’s critical infrastructure, including power, water, fuel, and manufacturing systems, is not just a best practice but increasingly critical to national security and a strong economy.
“We take a unique approach to extending gamification techniques to operational technology training environments,” Thompson said. “The foundation of gamification techniques is realistic visualizations. By combining this with modern game engines, operational technology is brought to life before the trainee’s eyes.”
Miranda and Thompson will present “Gamification of Operational Technology Cybersecurity Training Environments” Tuesday, December 7 at 4:00 pm in Room 4 of the Phoenix Convention Center.
For a list of all upcoming industry events where CACI will participate, visit https://www.caci.com/events.
