5 novembre 2018 | International, C4ISR
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — After Hurricane Michael ravaged Tyndall Air Force Base in October, airmen took on an unusual mission: recovering the servers base officials used to write, release and award contracts.
Reclaiming those servers — which contain data and contract vehicles used by Tyndall's two contracting squadrons to order everything for the base from supplies for the base to spare parts for aircraft — was a relatively minor victory when compared to the larger devastation faced by the installation.
But the mission was an important one in that it allowed remaining base personnel to manage contracts in the wake of the disaster, Air Force officials told Defense News.
“Obviously, the base is devastated ... but it's clear that there were open, existing contracts whether that was for simple things like cutting the lawn or delivering food to the chow hall on base,” said Richard Aldridge, the Air Force's program executive officer for business and enterprise systems. “Someone has got to either terminate them, or put them on pause or make sure vendors are getting paid for work that they had already done before the contract.”
In the days after the hurricane, airmen from Gunter Annex in Alabama worked with the state's civil air patrol to fly into the Florida panhandle, obtain Tyndall's servers and transport them back to Maxwell Air Force Base, where Gunter is located.
Then, the service transferred data from the legacy contract writing system into a new cloud-based system called CON-IT, short for Contracting Information Technology.
The servers from Tyndall weren't necessary for base officials to use CON-IT, said Mike Allen, the Air Force's CON-IT program manager. But without them, contract officers would be left with no digital record of past contracts, and would be forced to draw up new contracts for mundane goods and services that would normally be bought through indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contracts that allow for multiple orders.
"We were then able to migrate [the data from the servers] into CON-IT so that existing [indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity contracts] or ordering vehicles were available to them, and all of their existing contracts would be available to work with,” said Allen. “They weren't starting from a blank piece of paper.”
And moving to a cloud-based environment means that Tyndall's contracting data will no longer be vulnerable to future disasters, Aldridge added.
“It's ubiquitous; it doesn't matter where you are, you can access it,” he said.
Allen and Aldridge said the program office was able to transition Tyndall's data and train users on the new system, but were unable to provide details on how Tyndall's contracting officers had since used the new system.
The plan is to move all of the Air Force's current contract data from existing legacy systems to CON-IT by the end of 2019. The system, built by and originally developed by Appian for use by the Defense Information Systems Agency, has deployed to 1,100 users in 30 locations so far, Allen said.
CON-IT will replace three legacy systems: the standard procurement system that supports operational users; ConWrite, which supports the weapon system acquisition and research and development; and the automated contract preparation system for logistics contracts.
10 octobre 2023 | International, Aérospatial, Sécurité
In episode 24 of the Pilot Project Podcast, Juurlink shares what it was like to deploy to fight in Afghanistan with CHFA.
20 février 2018 | International, Aérospatial
Sydney, Feb 19, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - DroneShield Ltd (ASX:DRO) (OTCMKTS:DRSHF) ("DroneShield" or the "Company") is pleased to advise that the United States Defense Logistics Agency, the logistics combat support agency of the United States Department of Defense, has certified DroneShield's subsidiary DroneShield LLC under the United States / Canada Joint Certification Program DD2345 (militarily critical technical data agreement). With this certification, DroneShield LLC has established eligibility to access unclassified export-controlled technical data of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and Canada's Department of National Defence (DND). - United States Defense Logistics Agency has certified DroneShield LLC under the United States / Canada Joint Certification Program DD2345 (militarily critical technical data agreement). - Establishes eligibility to access unclassified military technical data belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and Canada's Department of National Defence (DND). DroneShield LLC's certification under this program is part of its participation in the U.S. DOD and Canadian DND procurement processes. This announcement follows the recent award to the Company of a NATO Stock Number for its DroneGun MKII product. About DroneShield Ltd Based in Sydney, Australia and Virginia, USA, DroneShield Ltd (ASX:DRO) (OTCMKTS:DRSHF) is a worldwide leader in drone security technology. The Company has developed the pre-eminent drone security solution that protects people, organisations and critical infrastructure from intrusion from drones. Its leadership brings world-class expertise in engineering and physics, combined with deep experience in defence, intelligence, and aerospace. http://www.abnnewswire.net/press/en/92055/DroneShield-Ltd-(ASX-DRO)-United-States-Canada-Joint-Certification-Program-DD2345-92055.html
29 mars 2019 | International, C4ISR, Sécurité, Autre défense
For the past decade, cybersecurity threats have moved from high in the software stack to progressively lower levels of the computational hierarchy, working their way towards the underlying hardware. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has driven the creation of a rapidly growing number of accessible devices and a multitude of complex chip designs needed to enable them. With this rapid growth comes increased opportunity for economic and nation-state adversaries alike to shift their attention to chips that enable complex capabilities across commercial and defense applications. The consequences of a hardware cyberattack are significant as a compromise could potentially impact not millions, but billions of devices. Despite growing recognition of the issue, there are no common tools, methods, or solutions for chip-level security currently in wide use. This is largely driven by the economic hurdles and technical trade-offs often associated with secure chip design. Incorporating security into chips is a manual, expensive, and cumbersome task that requires significant time and a level of expertise that is not readily available in most chip and system companies. The inclusion of security also often requires certain trade-offs with the typical design objectives, such as size, performance, and power dissipation. Further, modern chip design methods are unforgiving – once a chip is designed, adding security after the fact or making changes to address newly discovered threats is nearly impossible. “Today, it can take six to nine months to design a modern chip, and twice as long if you want to make that same design secure,” said Serge Leef, a program manager in DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). “While large merchant semiconductor companies are investing in in-house personnel to manually incorporate security into their high-volume silicon, mid-size chip companies, system houses, and start-ups with small design teams who create lower volume chips lack the resources and economic drivers to support the necessary investment in scalable security mechanisms, leaving a majority of today's chips largely unprotected.” To ease the burden of developing secure chips, DARPA developed the Automatic Implementation of Secure Silicon (AISS) program. AISS aims to automate the process of incorporating scalable defense mechanisms into chip designs, while allowing designers to explore economics versus security trade-offs and maximize design productivity. The objective of the program is to develop a design tool and IP ecosystem – which includes tool vendors, chip developers, IP licensers, and the open source community – that will allow security to be inexpensively incorporated into chip designs with minimal effort and expertise, ultimately making scalable on-chip security pervasive. Leef continued, “The security, design, and economic objectives of a chip can vary based on its intended application. As an example, a chip design with extreme security requirements may have to accept certain tradeoffs. Achieving the required security level may cause the chip to become larger, consume more power, or deliver slower performance. Depending on the application, some or all of these tradeoffs may be acceptable, but with today's manual processes it's hard to determine where tradeoffs can be made.” AISS seeks to create a novel, automated chip design flow that will allow the security mechanisms to scale consistently with the goals of the design. The design flow will provide a means of rapidly evaluating architectural alternatives that best address the required design and security metrics, as well as varying cost models to optimize the economics versus security tradeoff. The target AISS system – or system on chip (SoC) – will be automatically generated, integrated, and optimized to meet the objectives of the application and security intent. These systems will consist of two partitions – an application specific processor partition and a security partition implementing the on-chip security features. This approach is novel in that most systems today do not include a security partition due to its design complexity and cost of integration. By bringing greater automation to the chip design process, the burden of security inclusion can be profoundly decreased. While the threat landscape is ever evolving and expansive, AISS seeks to address four specific attack surfaces that are most relevant to digital ASICs and SoCs. These include side channel attacks, reverse engineering attacks, supply chain attacks, and malicious hardware attacks. “Strategies for resisting threats vary widely in cost, complexity, and invasiveness. As such, AISS will help designers assess which defense mechanisms are most appropriate based on the potential attack surface and the likelihood of a compromise,” said Leef. In addition to incorporating scalable defense mechanisms, AISS seeks to ensure that the IP blocks that make up the chip remain secure throughout the design process and are not compromised as they move through the ecosystem. As such, the program will also aim to move forward provenance and integrity validation techniques for preexisting design components by advancing current methods or inventing novel technical approaches. These techniques may include IP watermarking and threat detection to help validate the chip's integrity and IP provenance throughout its lifetime. AISS is part of the second phase of DARPA's Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) – a five-year, upwards of $1.5 billion investment in the future of domestic, U.S. government, and defense electronics systems. Under ERI Phase II, DARPA is exploring the development of trusted electronics components, including the advancement of electronics that can enforce security and privacy protections. AISS will help address this mission through its efforts to enable scalable on-chip security. DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on April 10, 2019 at the DARPA Conference Center, located at 675 North Randolph Street, Arlington, Virginia 22203, to provide more information about AISS and answer questions from potential proposers. For details about the event, including registration requirements, please visit: https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=6770487d820ee13f33af67b0980a7d73&tab=core&_cview=0 Additional information will be available in the forthcoming Broad Agency Announcement, which will be posted to www.fbo.gov. https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2019-03-25