Cybersecurity Threats Technology Center

This focus area aims to increase the reliability and employability of data for homeland security missions.

• Technical Objective 1: Identify and evaluate new and emerging technological applications, such as post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption, to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data at rest, in process, and in transit.
• Technical Objective 2: Identify and evaluate new resilient machine learning approaches, explainable AI (XAI) and human-machine teaming capabilities, and generative adversarial attack identification and mitigation approaches to increase trustworthiness of advanced data science and analytics.

This focus area aims to ensure the resilience of the data, software, and hardware used to execute homeland security mission functions.

• Technical Objective 1: Ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data at rest, in process, and in transit across software and hardware platforms by researching and evaluating new and emerging applications such as post-quantum cryptography and homomorphic encryption.
• Technical Objective 2: Ensure advanced computing software and hardware applications are designed to rapidly adapt to the evolving security environment and future technologies. Example applications include but are not limited to sensors and IoT, operational technologies (OT), cyber physical systems (CPS); high performance computers (HPC); microelectronics, edge, cloud, fog, mobile, and quantum computing and civil space systems.
• Technical Objective 3: Leverage advances in emerging technologies such as memory-safe programming languages, zero trust architectures; infrastructure as code/pilot light (IaC/PL); augmented, virtual, and cross reality (AR/VR/XR) and adaptive secure-by-design architectures to increase cybersecurity across operations.
• Technical Objective 4: Increase assurance across the supply chain and lifecycle of key software and hardware employed in cybersecurity functions and critical infrastructure such as security orchestration and automated response (SOAR), software bill of materials (SBOM), and federated identity, credential, and access management (ICAM).

This focus area aims to protect and enhance the networks that transport the voice and data between devices/humans and the interconnected software and hardware systems (e.g., 2X).

• Technical Objective 1: Identify and understand new and emerging communications concepts and technologies such as spectrum agility, broadband virtualization, and software defined networking to enable communications resilience in the face of increasingly congested and contested operational environments (spectrum scarcity, intentional interference).
• Technical Objective 2: Investigate advanced communications technologies (i.e., 5G/XG mobile networks, optical interlinks across proliferated low- Earth orbit satellite (LEO) networks, and quantum sensing receivers) to identify and assess new risks and potential attack surfaces as well as enable new use cases to dramatically enhance capabilities and create efficiencies for DHS missions.
• Technical Objective 3: Create techniques to maintain security and communications in an environment where new complex architectures (everything-as-a-service) present more attack surfaces for adversarial exploitation.
• Technical Objective 4: Identify gaps in existing standards that result in non-interoperable, proprietary, or inefficient solutions, to inform and accelerate the development of new standards resulting in improved techniques to test and verify conformance to standards.