The DARPA Open Catalog lists two (2) updated projects and one (1) new project in addition to MEMEX.
New:
PLAN X: Plan X is a foundational cyberwarfare program to develop platforms for the Department of Defense to plan for, conduct, and assess cyberwarfare in a manner similar to kinetic warfare. Toward this end the program will bridge cyber communities of interest from academe, to the defense industrial base, to the commercial tech industry, to user-experience experts.
Plan X has three (3) sub-projects:
Mistral Compiler: Mistral is an experimental language and compiler for highly concurrent, distributed programming, with an emphasis on the specification and maintenance of a virtual overlay network and communication over that network. The current Mistral compiler supports the first generation of Mistral, so not all features we architected for the language are supported at present. This open source package includes our compiler and an interpreter. Use of Mistral for running programs on distributed systems requires a run-time system not included in this package. Thus this Mistral package allows only for experimentation with the language.
Lua Native Big Number Library: The PolarBN library is a big number library for use in cryptographic applications. PolarBN is a Lua wrapper for the bignum library in PolarSSL. The wrapper is written in C, using the standard Lua headers. Compared to the two standard Lua big number libraries, PolarBN is substantially faster than lbc, and does not require openssl-dev, as does lbn.
avro-golang-compiler: This repository contains a modification of the Avro Java compiler to generate golang code that uses the Avro C bindings to actually parse serialized Avro containers. (Java, C, Golang) (no link for this project)
Due to my lack of background in this area, I found the Plan X project description, such as: “…assess cyberwarfare in a manner similar to kinetic warfare,” rather opaque. Do they mean like physical “war games?” Please clue me in if you can.
In trying to find an answer, I did read the Mistral documentation, such as it was and ran across:
One challenge in programming at Internet scale is the development of languages in which to do this programming. For example, concurrency and control of it is one aspect where current languages fall short. A typical highly concurrent language such as Erlang can handle at most a few thousand concurrent processes in a computation, and requires substantial assumptions about reliable interconnection of all hosts involved in such computation. In contrast, languages for programming at Internet-scale should scale to handle millions of processes, yet be tolerant of highly dynamic network environments where both hosts and communication paths may come and go frequently during the lifetime of an application.
Any Erlangers care to comment?
Another source of puzzlement is how one would simulate a network with all its attendant vulnerabilities? In addition to varying versions and updates of software, there is the near constant interaction of users with remote resources, email, etc. Your “defense” may be perfect except for when “lite” colonels fall for phishing email scams. Unless they intend to simulate user behavior as well. Just curious.
Updated:
I say updated because DARPA says updated. I was unable to discover an easy way to tell which sub-parts were updated. I don’t have a screen shot of an earlier listing. But, for that its worth:
Active Authentication (AA): The Active Authentication (AA) program seeks to develop novel ways of validating the identity of computer users by focusing on the unique aspects of individuals through software-based biometrics. Biometrics are defined as the characteristics used to recognize individuals based on one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits. This program is focused on behavioral biometrics. [Seven (7) projects.]
XDATA: XDATA is developing an open source software library for big data to help overcome the challenges of effectively scaling to modern data volume and characteristics. The program is developing the tools and techniques to process and analyze large sets of imperfect, incomplete data. Its programs and publications focus on the areas of analytics, visualization, and infrastructure to efficiently fuse, analyze and disseminate these large volumes of data. [Eighty-three (83) projects so you can understand the difficulty in spotting the update.]