A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) component is aiding private business and academic partners transition from a reactive cyber defense approach to one that is collaborative, proactive and timely.
Officials said the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) could eliminate some of the manual steps in cyber protection and enable effective collective defense by demonstrating a new Federated Command and Control (FC2) infrastructure with the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) protecting a multitude of organizations at once, a federation.
The endeavor involved highlighting work between S&T and FIT to pilot the infrastructure, officials said, as well as the benefits of a federated cybersecurity system that can orchestrate defense protocols.
The demonstration was comprised of a mix of physically separated hardware network spaces, and virtualized enclaves automatically joined to form federations, with the federations then automatically sharing attack indicators, recommending and applying defensive responses and performing various privacy-preserving joint calculations.
Experts maintain automating communication between organizations in a federated environment is a more efficient and effective method of alerting different groups when they may be vulnerable to cyberattacks, noting the system can autonomously share context and recommend actions to prevent or mitigate the effects of a potential attack.
“The federation should enable defenders to get ahead of the spread of malicious activity,” Edward Rhyne, S&T Program Manager for Federated Security, said.