Published in Military & Aerospace Electronics
Written by Megan Crouse
NASHUA, N.H. - Encryption and securing data have been a concern for a long time. This year an increasing number of cyber attacks, more refined attackers, and changes in the way the U.S. military connects devices from across services all added wrinkles to the data battleground.
The threat categories are many. Vehicle loss or capture, data loss or transport, nation state hackers or internal threats all can threaten or intercept data at rest, data in motion and physical technology. On top of basic measures to separate data, like virtual private networks, supply chain resilience and new frontiers like artificial intelligence and quantum computing are a big part of the conversation today.
New efforts
You’ve likely seen the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud services contract in the news, due in part to big-name big-budget rival partners Microsoft and Amazon. In July, the Pentagon canceled the cloud contract, saying “due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs.” However, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) still plans to solicit both tech giants for the program’s replacement, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC).
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What do adversaries want?
Protecting digital assets goes hand-in-hand with protecting physical ones.
“In the context of military systems, the U.S. wants to preserve its tech advantage,” says Steve Edwards, director of secure embedded systems at the Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense Solutions division in Ashburn, Va. “In a lot of cases the attacker is after the algorithms or software that’s running on a system that would provide that kind of advantage ... whether it’s some unique radar-tracking algorithm or image-processing algorithm. In some cases it’s the data the system collects.”