“Charles River has dedicated significant resources to build state-of-the-art cyber-defense systems that help the military get ahead of crippling cyberattacks,” said Dan Mitchell, the Technical Lead on the DAAMS effort. “We’re excited to leverage our expertise in advanced anomaly detection and machine learning techniques to help the US Navy detect cyberattacks before they can damage naval systems.”

Application-level software is frequently the target of attacks and can be difficult to protect. Although many current defense systems counter cyberattacks, they are narrowly focused or usable only at certain levels of the software stack and do not protect the full application. Attacks that operate on the memory space of applications are especially common, effective, and hard to detect using current systems.

We are applying our Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) Toolkit and the Anomaly Detection Toolkit to this problem. DAAMS will use these toolkits to detect cyberattacks on memory space by identifying anomalies without affecting the application’s mission-time performance.

DAAMS builds on our capabilities in cyber defense, such as our cyber-vulnerability testing in HAMLET and our cyber-modeling and adversary toolkit, CyMod.