Recently, major military organizations came together to test and evaluate new cyber threat detection technologies, the agencies said Monday.
As part of a joint operation with the U.S. Army Cyber Command Technical Warfare Center, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Project Manager-Defensive Cyber Operations, the groups successfully demonstrated the Cyber Analytics for Network Defense and Response Options (CANDOR) platform and its ability to deploy within an operational test environment to detect and analyze malicious activity. CANDOR is a project within the Constellation program, a joint effort between DARPA and the U.S. Cyber Command to expedite delivery of cyber technologies from the lab to the cyber battlefield. The aim is to provide cyber operators with enhanced network monitoring and automated threat hunting, officials said.
“This test proved CANDOR’s high flexibility and adaptability as an innovative solution designed for deployment across multiple environments,” LTC Nate Bastian, the DARPA program manager for CANDOR, said. “Given Constellation’s objective to accelerate the transition of research and development to capability delivery, we were able to drastically shorten the design, development, and testing of CANDOR from months to weeks with consistent user integration with ARCYBER.”
CANDOR uses technology for containerization – software deployment that bundles an application’s code with all the files and libraries in needs to run on any infrastructure. The containerization enables seamless integration and scalability in diverse infrastructures. CANDOR’s containerization architecture also translates to rapid deployment, easy updates and consistent performance, officials said, ensuring that the software can adapt to changing security requirements and operational demands in the future.
Officials said the test was a critical milestone for validating the platform’s readiness before deployment in a production environment.