MODIFICATION
A -- Advanced, Trusted, Secure Hardware and Software System Computational Technologies
- Notice Date
- 5/12/2014
- Notice Type
- Modification/Amendment
- NAICS
- 541712
— Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Biotechnology)
- Contracting Office
- Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL/RIK - Rome, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, New York, 13441-4514, United States
- ZIP Code
- 13441-4514
- Solicitation Number
- BAA-RIK-13-06
- Point of Contact
- Gail E. Marsh, Phone: 315-330-7518
- E-Mail Address
-
Gail.Marsh@us.af.mil
(Gail.Marsh@us.af.mil)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- The purpose of this modification is to revise SECTION I, Funding Opportunity Description as follows. For ease of reading the entity section is included below. New information can be found in 4th paragraph below and also in the new technical area (5) added at the end of this section. Please note the specific due date for white papers for this area. No other changes have been made. I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: The Air Force cyberspace must operate and be built upon a strengthened, trusted foundation that assures mission-essential functions across all Air Force missions, while being agile and resilient and providing the ability to avoid, fight through, survive and recover from advanced cyber threats. The Trusted Systems Branch of the Information Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Rome Research Site, is soliciting white papers under this announcement for technologies to explore, research and develop innovative and potentially disruptive technologies that support trusted foundations/architectures for high assurance, secure, resilient systems, while increasing computational sophistication, capacity, and energy and cost performance efficiencies under constraints imposed by Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) trusted/secure systems and performance-requirement-driven layered information processing battlefield systems and networks. Additional innovative technologies are sought that will enable the engineering of secure and correct complex software-intensive systems resulting in trust, and migrate the analysis from execution to the design and development phases. Of particular interest are technologies that support architectures for high assurance, trusted/secure architectures, increased computational sophistication, more complex system functionality with improved quality, dramatic improvements in the energy/performance/cost of systems, embedded processing and quantum information processing. Also of interest are technologies that can reduce warfighter decision latencies/response time, decrease system costs and system development times, automate labor-intensive/error-prone and costly aspects of system software development, and improve reliability, longevity, and usability of new and legacy military computing systems. The Department of Defense (DoD) requires trustworthy data and software executables for successful performance of assigned missions; However, there is significant uncertainty about the DoD's Software Assurance (SwA) capability to achieve the level of confidence that software functions as intended (and only as intended) and remains free of vulnerabilities across legacy systems and systems being acquired. Any approach for Software Assurance must address vulnerabilities and weaknesses to cyber threats of the system as a whole from the beginnings of design and not be a piecemeal approach applied as an afterthought. Implementation must be top down; covering a risk based approach for the system itself as well as addressing supply chain management and enforcement. In the end, the approach must deliver a high level of assurance that the software system is self-contained, the data is verifiably incorruptible/trustworthy, executables protected while at rest, under execution, or in transit within any environment/system relevant to the warfighter. While the solution space offers software-only or hardware-assisted data and executable protections, measuring and verifying assurance of the incorruptibility/trust is of utmost importance. Lastly, while the rapidly evolving threat environment requires a consistent approach to protecting our systems, it must also be agile, as it must be recognized that in most cases, a "one size fits all" solution will not work. Different types of applications have differing threat profiles, varying by criticality, threats, Software Assurance requirements and concerns (ie. web based application verse real-time embedded application verse flight/safety critical application verse development tools). This effort will investigate the research, application and/or development of trusted/secure information processing architecture technologies, products and standards as they relate to the following technical areas: (1) Development of appropriate information technology to enhance the processing capabilities of current and future Air Force C4I systems: This technical area encompasses all information processing technology, both hardware and software that could potentially contribute to enhancing the security, trustworthiness, functionality, performance, reliability, longevity, scalability, resiliency and usability of legacy or planned Air Force C4I processing systems. Examples of hardware technologies include multi-core processing architectures with emphasis on hardware support for semantic operations, power reducing/power management/power aware processing architectures, high assurance/trusted/secure processing architectures, data storage, performance optimization visualization tools, mobile and wireless networks and technologies necessary to achieve secure information processing. Examples of software technologies include High Performance Computing (HPC) programming languages both new and existing, data retrieval/mining, data management, data delivery, software/system monitors, publish/subscribe mechanisms, decision making techniques, distributed databases, static and dynamic runtime optimization and resource management. (2) Trusted Software-intensive Systems Engineering: The objective of the trusted software-intensive systems engineering technical area is to develop techniques, methodologies and tools to guarantee trust (as measured by correctness, security, reliability, predictability, and survivability) and migrate the analysis from execution (testing and monitoring) to design (correct-by-construction and formal/security specifications) and development (composition and auto-generation of artifacts). Technical areas of interest include: techniques to enable trust in model-based software engineering; model-based engineering for predictable software attributes; provably correct code generation; evidence-based software assurance; trusted software and systems composability; modeling, analysis, and verification of autonomous software; mechanisms to fight through software failures; and software comprehension. (3) Quantum Information Processing: This technical area includes one-way quantum computation using cluster/graphs states, measurement based quantum computation, quantum computing with an emphasis on the utilization of photon-based qubits, quantum algorithms employing cluster/graph states or quantum annealing or adiabatic quantum computation, blind quantum computation, single-photon/entangled-photons on demand, quantum integrated optical waveguide circuitry, reduced measurement methodologies for quantum tomography of multi-qubit states. (4) Secure, resilient and Trusted Computing Architectures: The objective of this technical area is to investigate the necessary building blocks for secure and resilient computing environments (environments where compelling evidence is supplied to determine a high level of trustworthiness), including both the underlying hardware and software to support it. Technical areas of interest include, but are not limited to: (a) Problems and challenges with current processor designs for trustworthiness and their solutions; (b) Problems and challenges with current computer architectures for trustworthiness and solutions to them; (c) Operating System level constructs, objects, functions and distributions that must be provided to complement the hardware to enable a trustworthy computing base; (d) State of the art software-based assurance designs, methodologies or concepts which are better suited for implementation in hardware than software. This technical area is also interested in research and development for increasing the level of trustworthiness of integrated circuit designs, commodity integrated circuits and currently available systems as a whole. Finally, this technical area is also interested in security enhancements possible in the software tool chain used for compiling and linking source code as well as research in the implications of state-of-the-art commercially available processor architectures and specially designed processor architectures that will enable delivery of trustworthy, secure and timely information. (5) Software Assurance Framework: Achieving the degree of Software Assurance across the application space requires a holistic approach that agilely addresses all layers of the supply chain and enterprise including governance, partnerships, process, standards, and education. The objective of this area is to create the foundations of such a Software Assurance holistic approach including the CONOPS for an organizing entity that will classify and prioritize the use of relevant and continuously vetted tools to create a higher baseline in terms of systemic SwA for the DoD and its most critical Defense Industry Base (DIB) partners. The entity will focus on developing and monitoring adherence to an appropriate risk-based assessment framework for software assurance, aligning each class of software with appropriate depth and breadth of validation and verification tools. The initial domain for this topic is DoD embedded systems. Areas of interest include: (a) Develop the Concepts of Operation (CONOPS) of a central SwA entity and requisite SwA Integrated Product Team. This will include, but is not limited to, the definition and plan for implementing the strategies, objectives, plans, procedures and roadmaps for a central Software Assurance entity within the DoD and an operational entity located at AFRL/RI Rome NY. (b) SwA Tools Assessment and Categorization- Perform baseline evaluation of initial toolsets to be used in the Software Assurance process. Define the appropriate depth and breadth of validation and verification tools for various classes of DoD embedded software providing a standardized set of the best and most appropriate tools. (c) Prototype Software Assurance Demonstration - Run a pilot demonstration on an exemplar program office code base. (d) SwA technology - seeks to advance the state of SwA at scale. Research in this area will address the technology gaps to improve SwA tools (e.g. precision and recall) and scalability (e.g. code size, expertise required, and execution time). Responses for Technical Area (5) may address one or more of the areas of interest. Directions specific to the Software Assurance Framework technical area: i. Technical Areas (a), (b) and (c) will receive priority in funding. It is anticipated that one effort will be funded in each. ii. Awards will be no more than 12 months iii. Typical awards will not exceed $1.5M iv. For best chance of award please submit whitepaper by noon EST 9 June 2014.
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