Charles River Analytics, developer of intelligent systems solutions, has announced a contract awarded by the US Army to design and build a cyber defense system that will help analyze cyber vulnerabilities and develop proactive defense strategies. The Cyber Attacker and Network Vulnerability Analysis and Simulation system, or CANVAS, is a two-year follow-on contract valued at just under $1 million.
“CANVAS expands on our existing work in cyber defense and behavior modeling to provide a new approach to cyber defense,” said Dr. Amy Sliva, a scientist at Charles River and technical lead on CANVAS. “We are focusing on human and strategic elements of cyberattacks in addition to technical elements, which will help us understand likely adversary behaviors and develop proactive defensive measures before an attack.”
The CANVAS system enables cyber defenders and policy makers to create behavior models to analyze adversary behavior in a network simulation engine. CANVAS then produces predictions of attacks and provides defenders with a tool to recommend defensive actions.
Charles River is partnering with PatchPlus Consulting and Strategic Mission Elements for the CANVAS effort.
CANVAS builds on Charles River’s previous efforts in cyber defense, including its MAAGI software for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to detect and analyze malware attacks, and its SESAME project for the US Air Force to counter malware threats.
This material is based upon work supported by the Communications-Electronics, Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC) under Contract No. W56KGU-15-C-0053. 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 Communications-Electronics, Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC).
