DARPA contracts with Vencore Labs for advanced cyberdefense research
NewsMarch 24, 2017
ARLINGTON, Va. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that it has awarded Vencore Labs, Inc., with multiple contracts to deliver research in the area of cyberdefense against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. The contracts are valued at $17.7 million and will be performed as part of DARPA?s Extreme DDoS Defense (XD3) program over the next three years.
Under the terms of the contract, Vencore Labs -- headquartered in Basking Ridge, N.J. -- will develop a comprehensive solution to cover the full spectrum of the areas that would be subject to DDoS attacks. Vencore's research and conclusions for DARPA on distributed communications and network maneuvering, says the company, will obstruct would-be cyberattackers and deny them the critical feedback they need to determine whether an attack is successful. In addition, Vencore's work on DDoS detection and mitigation will help network operators protect critical services from the effects of large-scale Internet of Things (IoT)-based attacks.
The goal of the government's XD3 program is to develop new defenses that are more resilient to a broad range of DDoS attacks than existing approaches. Several DDoS attacks in past months have caused widespread disruption to popular Internet services; such attacks often leverage the widespread and growing deployment of IoT devices -- combined with freely available malicious code -- to create disruption that easily overwhelms the currently used defensive techniques.
