Jane Edwards
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity has awarded research contracts to five companies as part of a program that seeks to develop smart radio techniques that can detect and classify radio frequency signals linked to potential data breaches.
A10 Systems AiRANACULUS, BAE Systems, Expedition Technology, JASR Systems and Northrop Grumman won the contracts through a competitive broad agency announcement for IARPA’s Securing Compartmented Information with Smart Radio Systems program, the agency said Tuesday.
The SCISRS program seeks to improve the capability of the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to protect data transmitted, used and stored in secure facilities and is expected to result in developments in digital signal processing techniques and machine learning.
“Our research goal is extremely challenging because we need to scan an enormous frequency range and analyze terabytes of data every second — we are looking for the proverbial needles in the RF haystack,” said Paul Kolb, SCISRS program manager. “If we want to deploy SCISRS everywhere, we must find a way to run hyper-efficient algorithms on modestly-priced hardware.”
The program’s test and evaluation team is composed of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and another government lab and is tasked with evaluating the companies’ platforms.
