Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced a follow-on contract to build a cyber-resilient framework for the US Navy. The two-year contract for Embedded Architecture for Cyber-resilience, or EAC, is valued close to $750,000, with two possible contract options for an additional $1.25 million. EAC will help defend cyber physical systems from attacks and enable them to function with minimal disruption.

“Cyber physical systems are employed widely in Navy operations,” explained Curt Wu, Chief Software Engineer at Charles River and Principal Investigator on the EAC effort. “As these systems become more interconnected, they become more exposed to cyberattacks. We’re building the EAC framework to protect cyber physical systems from threats.”

EAC ensures fine-grained isolation of both system- and application-level components and uses novel anomaly detection algorithms to locate compromises. When a component is compromised, EAC automatically restores that component to a known good state. EAC combines a component-based operating system structure with novel system monitoring and fault detection algorithms to provide attack and fault resiliency for cyber physical systems.

Charles River is partnering with Professor Gabriel Parmer, an expert in operating system design and real-time systems, of George Washington University. The team will extend the Composite operating system, developed by George Washington University, in the EAC framework.

EAC is one of Charles River’s efforts in resilient system design, building novel computer architectures that are not as vulnerable to attacks and failures.

This material is based upon work supported by the Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N68335-17-C-0153. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Naval Research.