Scott Nicholas
Galois has secured a $750,000 grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory to support the development of a cyber deception technology that will look to mislead potential attackers that monitor network activities.
The company said Thursday it received the funds under Phase II of a Small Business Innovation Research program effort for the Prattle cyber deception technology.
Prattle is designed to generate realistic network traffic in efforts to drive adversaries into making mistakes, reduce their leverage over the network and facilitate detection, Galois added.
Adam Wick, Galois research lead and principal investigator, said the award works to expand the company’s work on real-world applications for network defense and cyber deception.
Galois will team up with Tufts University to lead research on high-fidelity network protocol emulation.
Formaltech, a Galois subsidiary, will serve as a subcontractor and collaborate with cybersecurity and networking equipment manufacturers Fidelis Cybersecurity and PacStar.
Phase I of the Prattle project worked to demonstrate the creation of realistic traffic, while Phase II will focus on the expansion of traffic-generation capacity across various protocols as well as the deployment  of “honey data” that will be used to misdirect attackers.
