RTI Awarded $500K Additional U.S. Government Funding to Standardize DoD Cybersecurity Technology
RTI is working with the DoD to Further Enhance the Interoperation of, and Rapid Updates to, their deployed Cybersecurity Infrastructure
Real-Time Innovations (RTI), announced that it has been awarded $500K in additional government funding to continue support of their Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract. RTI will augment its Connext DDS commercial software product to advance the cybersecurity capabilities of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) by bridging the gap between proprietary cybersecurity solutions and standardization.
RTI was granted additional funding to focus on the provisioning of the DoD’s cybersecurity tools which will enable secure, reliable, and rapid delivery of updates to their cyberinfrastructure. With the previous government funding, RTI was able to successfully develop data models for multiple cyber tools and evolve those data models over time. RTI delivered common, open cyber tool data models and application control interfaces to enable plug-and-play cyber tool interoperability between providers including major cybersecurity antivirus tools and SIEMs.
Today, cybersecurity tools are tightly coupled, requiring multiple system configuration changes to add or remove components within a cybersecurity system. Such challenges force organizations to accept vendor lock-in and a lack of complete control over their systems or to purchase multiple tools to work around proprietary data connections, which increases system complexity. Additional tools and services must then be purchased to allow communication and interoperability between all system components. These challenges make systems brittle, harder to maintain, and increase the total cost of operation (TCO). The capability we are developing is intended to give control back to system owners, allowing them to select the best cyber tool software for the job and to enable disparate systems and tools to transparently coexist.
The RTI Research Team will continue its initiative by researching solutions that will dramatically reduce the cyber tool upgrade cycle by providing the ability to rapidly install, test and deploy new toolsets, configuration files, and settings within the DoD’s combat systems. RTI will continue to work with the DoD and other industry stakeholders to pursue standardization of these cyber data models and interfaces by international standards bodies. This will encourage widespread adoption and ultimately drive down for the cost of building and maintaining combat system cybersecurity.
“With the increasing prominence of cyberattacks, the DoD needs to get away from vendor-locked cyber solutions, which create cross-system interoperability challenges and raise costs,” says Paul Pazandak, Director of Advanced Research, RTI. “RTI is proud to be trusted to continue to lead this initiative to evolve and mature our vision of standardizing cybersecurity technology to drive higher levels of interoperability while lowering operational costs.