Trust-Enabled Cyber Craft

Cyber Defense Agency sees cyber craft as a potentially powerful distributed security enforcement mechanism performing a variety of functions from intrusion detection to policy enforcement. To realize the great potential, the elements require a means to establish trust or else the cyber craft could be hijacked as a powerful attack vector. Without a means to establish trust, the risks of using cyber craft for defense will be too high, system owners will be reluctant to employ defensive cyber craft, and the vulnerability to certain types of attacks of networks and systems will remain high. This proposal describes a program that will develop techniques and tools to enable cyber craft and host systems to establish mutual trust and to use dynamic risk assessment of alternative cyber craft workflows to determine the lowest risk means to accomplish its mission by most effectively using the established trust.