Opportunities for Advantage: Mobilizing Innovation through the DHS Science and Technology Directorate

06/20/2022 | Written by: Daniel Pereira

This analysis of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Science and Technology (S&T) Impact Series falls into two OODA Loop editorial and curation thematic:

Opportunities for Advantage: Exponential disruption requires a focus on gaining advantage. We encourage our membership to stay informed on a variety of these critical issues at OODAloop.com, during our monthly OODA Network meetings, in the OODA Forum, and Salons. And, of course, OODAcast conversations and revisiting the OODAcast archive.

We also have an ongoing series entitled “Opportunities for Advantage”, where we surface technologies, industry sectors, new markets, policies, or trends which have become applied technologies (with opportunities for alpha and beta prototype efforts), clear signs that early adopter and partnership opportunities exist for strategic advantage, and/or definitive metrics (which are a final resolution of an issue which was previously only seen as a ‘trend’). Recent Topics in the “Opportunities for Advantage” series include:

Innovation (Design Frameworks and Methodologies): Focusing on the intersection of U.S. federal innovation efforts and high technology private sector efforts, we make an effort to highlight legislative, program management, and research and development efforts that offer an innovative framework, methodology, standardization effort or design process that (based on our experience) will succeed in enabling the size and scale of innovation required by the impacts of exponential disruption and a national decision-making apparatus significantly stressed by multiple simultaneous crises. Examples include:

The DHS Impact Series

Produced and archived over the course of 2021, the DHS S&T Impact series explores opportunities for advantage through an ongoing exploration within DHS of the definition of innovation within the agency and internal frameworks for innovation (and private sector and interagency collaboration): The DHS Impact Series is a web and video series that “delves into the core homeland security mission areas and highlights how the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is helping agents, officers, first responders and decision-makers with some of their toughest challenges.” The objective: mobilizing innovation.

“As the research and development arm of DHS, “S&T has the unique privilege of working with operators from all areas of homeland security, industry leaders and small businesses, and academia and laboratories. They all share in the Directorate’s passion for mobilizing innovation to secure the nation. S&T is always looking for new partners to meet our mission. If you’re interested in helping strengthen the nation’s homeland security, visit our Work with S&T page to discover the many ways to work with S&T. Watch the latest S&T Impact videos and visit the pages to see how S&T is mobilizing innovation to secure the nation.” (1)

The S&T Impact: Cybersecurity

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) helps improve cybersecurity capabilities through strategic research and development (R&D) in the areas of mitigation, solution development, and resilience. In line with the DHS Cybersecurity Strategy, S&T brings together leading innovators in academia, industry, and government to identify new tools and tactics that can help network owners and operators overcome emerging cyber threats.

Distributed Denial of Service Defense

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are used to render key resources unavailable. A classic DDoS attack disrupts a financial institution’s website and temporarily blocks the ability of consumers to bank online. A more strategic attack makes a key resource inaccessible during a critical period. Some examples of this type of attack may include rendering a florist’s website unavailable on Valentine’s Day, slowing or blocking access to tax documents in mid-April, or disrupting communication during a critical trading window. Prominent DDoS attacks have been conducted against financial institutions, news organizations, internet security resource providers, and government agencies. All organizations that rely on network resources are considered potential targets.

Federated Security

Federated Security combines several aspects of the former Moving Target Defense (MTD) and Security for Cloud-based Systems projects with the goal of improving cyber-defensive capabilities through the use of cyber intelligence sharing and incorporating various defensive technologies into federations of enterprises. These federations are comprised of various organizations who have voluntarily agreed to join their organization’s network into a defensive federation with other participants, with the goal being to mutually enhance each federation member’s security posture. Federation participants may include but are not limited to government agencies, critical infrastructure owners and operators, national labs, and research & development organizations. Incorporated technologies may use MTD principles to provide capabilities that dynamically shift the attack surface, making it more difficult for hackers to strike.

Cyber Risk Economics

Cybersecurity is a multidimensional problem that demands multidisciplinary attention. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate’s (S&T) Cyber Risk Economics (CYRIE) project supports research into the business, legal, technical and behavioral aspects of the economics of cyber-threats, vulnerabilities, and controls. CYRIE R&D emphasizes empirically-based measurement, modeling, and evaluation of:

Investment into cybersecurity controls (technology, regulatory, and legal) by private-sector, government, and private actors;
Impact of investment on the probability, severity, and consequences of actual risks and resulting cost and harm;
Value of the correlation between business performance measures and evaluations of cybersecurity investments and impacts; and
Incentives to optimize the investments, impacts, and value basis of cyber-risk management.

Information Marketplace for Policy and Analysis of Cyber-risk & Trust

The Information Marketplace for Policy and Analysis of Cyber-risk & Trust (IMPACT) project supports the global cyber-risk research community by coordinating and developing real-world data and information-sharing capabilities—tools, models, and methodologies. To accelerate solutions around cyber-risk issues and infrastructure security, the IMPACT project enables empirical data and information-sharing between and among the global cybersecurity research and development (R&D) community in academia, industry, and government. Importantly, IMPACT also addresses the cybersecurity decision-analytic needs of Homeland Security Enterprise (HSE) customers in the face of high volume, high-velocity, high-variety, and/or high-value data through its network of Decision Analytics-as-a-Service Providers (DASP). These resources are a service technology or tool capable of supporting the following types of analytics: descriptive (what happened), diagnostic (why it happened), predictive (what will happen), and prescriptive (what should happen).

Smart Cities

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) jointly sponsor the 2018 Global City Teams Challenge (GCTC), which will focus on designing- cybersecurity into smart-city systems, making them more secure, reliable, resilient and protective of privacy.

Launched in 2014, the GCTC helps communities partner with innovators using networked technologies to solve problems ranging from mass transit improvement to energy management to disaster response. The new phase of the GCTC—called the Smart and Secure Cities and Communities Challenge (SC3)—addresses the question of how communities can secure their complex device networks against cyber-attacks while using these devices to improve community services.

The partnership takes advantage of the strengths of each agency: NIST’s ties to smart-city ecosystems and S&T Cyber Security Division’s connections to the cybersecurity industry.

Direct links to the DHS S&T Series topics (with additional links and resources):

Stay Informed

It should go without saying that tracking threats are critical to informing your actions. This includes reading our OODA Daily Pulse, which will give you insights into the nature of the threat and risks to business operations.