Low-Cost Security for Autonomous Collaboration

The challenges posed by near-peer competitors motivate the dispersion and disaggregation of our combat power. The Armament Directorate is therefore developing the capability to deliver massed weapon waves. Swarms of semi-autonomous, collaborative weapons and decoys will adapt to the increasingly sophisticated countermeasures of our adversaries, thereby increasing the speed and accuracy of target destruction. Network-enabled weapon data links are traditionally secured with NSA Type 1 products. Although suitable for exquisite weapons such as the JASSM-ER, Type 1 products impose a “crushingly high” cost-per-round for massed weapon waves. The stringent anti-tamper requirements for Type 1 hardware also place an undue size and weight burden on weapons and decoys that are otherwise disposable. A clear and present need therefore exists for an affordable alternative to today’s Type 1 products that can be used to secure the data links for tomorrow’s swarming collaborative munitions. Caliola Engineering’s commercial OverKey solution forms a high assurance mesh on top of any wired or wireless network, so that group communications can be efficiently secured when bandwidth is limited. In this SBIR effort, we will tailor OverKey to secure swarming collaborative weapon data links. The NSA’s Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program certifies commercial VPN technology for use in layered configurations that protect Secret and Top Secret data. This provides the blueprint for securing weapon data links with two nested layers of OverKey. OverKey implements the same NSA Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite algorithms that are used in accredited CSfC solutions, but adds support for group communications and dynamic security via its patent-pending network management protocol.