The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) posted a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information on research efforts in the use of deception for cyber defenses, the agency said in a FedBizOpps posting Monday.
IARPA said that while denial and deception (D&D) has been used by militaries for defense it can also be looked at similarly for increasing cyber defense posture and resiliency.
“Adapting D&D to support the engagement of cyber adversaries is a concept that has been gaining momentum, although the current state of research and practice is still immature: many techniques lack rigorous experimental measures of effectiveness, information is insufficient to determine how defensive deception changes attacker behavior or how deception increases the likeliness of early detection of a cyber attack,” the RFI said.
IARPA defined deception as the deliberate action taken by a cyber defender to mislead and gain an advantage over a cyber adversary through tactics including manipulation, distortion, and falsification of evidence.
The RFI seeks to identify existing capabilities and emerging methods related to deception for cyber defense as well as approaches for assessing the performance of such methods.
Responses to the RFI are asked to answer various questions focusing on topics including existing deception methods, test and evaluation of methods, emerging methods, and organization/services information.
The responses may be used to support a one-day workshop on deception for cyber defense, with an expected result of that being the identification of promising areas for research investment.
RFI responses are due on July 1 via email.