IARPA Soliciation - Office of Safe and Secure Operations

IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research that has the potential to provide our nation with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries. This research is parsed among three Offices: Smart Collection, Incisive Analysis, and Safe & Secure Operations. This BAA solicits abstracts/proposals for the Office of Safe and Secure Operations (SSO).

SSO focuses on threats to the Intelligence Community's ability to operate freely and effectively in an increasingly interdependent and networked world. While some of our challenges emanate from adversary actors, others emerge coincidentally with changes in technology or business practices. This BAA solicits research that explores or demonstrates the feasibility of revolutionary concepts in computation, trust establishment and maintenance, and detecting and deflecting hostile intent. Examples include:

• Approaches to operating securely with imperfect equipment, error-prone users and/or a compromised network. Constructing systems that can perform reliable and secure computations when some fraction of their components is unreliable or insecure.
• Computational methods based on architectures other than digital Turing machines whose attributes are matched to efficient or secure solution of intelligence problems (e.g., optical, analog, biological, brain-based, quantum, or hybrid computing systems).
• New algorithms and protocols that take advantage of quantum entanglement to perform tasks that are inefficient with classical algorithms.
• New approaches to secure transmission of information using optical, electromagnetic, digital packet, chemical, or biological signals. Domains include synchronous and asynchronous communications, bandwidth-constrained digital transmission, and triage of large data flows.
• Methods (including compilers and programming languages) for performing complicated computations securely, e.g. multi-party secure functional computation and full homomorphic encryption, but with low overhead.
• Detection, classification, and mitigation of attempts by adversaries to compromise safety and security, including, but not limited to penetration and manipulation of electronic infrastructure.
• Novel ideas for technologies enabling energy-efficient computation beyond the efficiency projected for end-of-roadmap silicon, as well as strategies for using existing computing technologies to compute with lower power budgets.

This announcement seeks research ideas for topics that are not addressed by emerging or ongoing IARPA programs or other published IARPA solicitations. It is primarily, but not solely, intended for early stage research that may lead to larger, focused programs through a separate BAA in the future, so periods of performance will generally not exceed 12 months.

Offerors should demonstrate that their proposed effort has the potential to make revolutionary, rather than incremental, improvements to intelligence capabilities. Research that primarily results in evolutionary improvement to the existing state of practice is specifically excluded.