Robust End-to-End Trust (RE2ET)

ABSTRACT: The objective of this proposal is to identify and quantify trust metrics for all of the resources in a complex network infrastructure, determine a method for securing communications, and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to quantify and adopt the end-to-end trust of components in large network infrastructures. The proposed approach will verify the trust in critical components, adopt their trust values due to changes in network configurations, polices or being compromised, and protect their operations in spite of compromises. The main components to implement the proposed RE2ET approach are: Secure Regenerated Keying (SRK) technology to deliver secure communications among critical components, Mutual Authentication module to verify the authenticity of different components, Autonomic Trust Management agent that monitors and collect component behavior metrics and to guarantee that all interacting components meet the end-to-end trust requirements, and Trust Authority module that continuously evaluates and adopts the trust level value assigned to each component. Our approach to develop trust metrics will leverage EnrGie SKR technology and AVIRTEK"s Autonomia environment, which is an autonomic computing environment, to build the Autonomic Trust Management (ATM) agents. In addition, we will leverage AVIRTEK"s feature selection algorithm to determine the best metrics for measuring and quantifying trust. BENEFIT: Avirtek has solid record of performance in addressing the often-competing demands of innovation, technology readiness, and commercialization. We have successfully applied AUTONOMIA - an autonomic control and management environment - to a wide range of network-centric applications such the Autonomic Network Defense (AND) system for small and enterprise networks. The AND prototype, which has been demonstrated to the Air Force Battle Lab and other Department of Defense (DoD) units, achieves higher than 99% detection rate and extremely low false alarm rate (less than 0.5%). A commercial Automated and Integrated Management (AIM) appliance based on AND system has been tested and evaluated by Ball Aerospace Corporation and shown to detect and protect against a wide range of cyber attacks. In this Phase I of this project, we will leverage the Autonomia and AIM technologies to demonstrate critical capabilities for building the proposed resilient cloud services. Through both technologies, we aim to accurately build an adaptive high-level knowledge about the state of the cloud system, and proactively learn from and defend against cloud attacks. We envision significant opportunity to commercialize the RT2ET technology to government agencies and enterprise companies. Avirtek has developed innovative solutions that address the foremost aspects of cybersecurity enriching its staff with exceptional expertise along with proven track record for technology transfer. The outcome of this Phase will be feasibility study and design of the RT2ET framework and a report containing the blue prints and recommendations to implement robust end to end trust among a large number of components interacting and collaborating in complex network infrastructures. Such recommendations and design will be carried forward into a Phase II to transfer that into a proof-of-concept to be demonstrated to target customers.