REFLECT - Radar Emission Fuzzing and Logging for Exploitability and Countermeasure Testing

Cyber vulnerabilities in DoD systems provide adversaries with methods to disrupt operations through cyber attack. DoD and industry spend significant time, money, and effort to identify and patch these vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities must be identified by means of various processes (i.e., cyber tabletop exercises, penetration tests, vulnerability assessments, etc.) and tools designed to probe the system to uncover the vulnerabilities (i.e., nmap, Nessus, Censys, etc.). Traditionally, cyber reconnaissance tools are used to gather information about a system that is accessible via a network (i.e. personal laptops, smartphones, servers, etc.) and therefore are constrained by the networking standards that define the communication between these systems (i.e. Wi-Fi, ethernet, TCP/IP, HTTPS, etc.). While these traditional vulnerabilities are important to identify and having cyber reconnaissance tools is necessary for that identification, vulnerability identification tools need to be expanded to non-traditional applications. The increasing deployment of software-defined receiver technologies in communications, RADAR, and SIGINT applications provide different software attack surfaces that can be exploited. To protect these systems there is a need to redefine what a cyber vulnerability is and the reconnaissance tools that identify them. Secmation proposes Radar Emission Fuzzing and Logging for Exploitability and Countermeasure Testing (REFLECT) as a new capability to enhance the resilience of MDA and DoD RADAR systems. The key innovation in REFLECT is the integrated signal Artificial Intelligence (AI) that significantly improves search effectiveness and efficiency. Like traditional fuzzing, RF signal fuzzing using brute force methods is both inefficient and not scalable. While the use of heuristic, pre-programmed metrics can improve the search process, these solutions require an experienced designer with significant understanding of the target system. REFLECT’s AI enhanced search with integrated training enables the vulnerability scanner to learn about the target system and efficiently identify new pathways to exploitable vulnerabilities.