U.S. Navy awards Promia $7 million for Internet Security productsSan Francisco 27 September 2001 Promia Incorporated, a developer of next-generation Internet Security products, has been awarded by the U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) $7,000,000 to test and deliver twenty Advanced Internet Security systems. This procurement represents Phase III of a U.S. Navy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Programme and compliments a multi-year research and development effort by Promia and the U.S. Navy to design and build the systems.
The Internet security system to be delivered to the U.S. Navy is code-named the
"Intelligent Agent Security Module" (IASM) and is to be deployed as a primary means of providing information analysis and protection on ships and shore-based facilities. The IASM product was designed to address known problems found in the current generation of intrusion detection devices such as the generation of high volumes of false alarms and the inability to detect new types of attacks.
IASM is a supercomputer-based system that uses a CORBA secure component architecture designed to manage the accurate and consistent detection and validation of internally and externally generated network incidents. The system detects known attacks using various techniques to correlate single and multiple events, while novel attacks are detected using advanced analytic techniques to identify aberrant behaviours.
IASM also includes a visualisation component designed to encourage rapid understanding of complex events with selectable levels of response suitable to the needs of the U.S. Navy and other branches of the U.S. Department of Defense. High performance Beowulf cluster machines, supercomputing platforms developed at NASA, are included to support the analytic
modules of IASM.
"This", according to Promia's Principal Analyst, Dr. Stephen Neville, "makes it feasible to expose aberrant behaviours even within the sea of normal traffic. Traditionally hackers have had the luxury of hiding their actions within the large volumes of network messages. The combination of advanced analytic techniques with low cost, scalable supercomputers seriously
hinders the attackers ability to hide."
Commercial versions of the Promia IASM product, including a Promia Internet Appliance, are on schedule as required by the Navy SBIR Agreement. Lt. Frank Ottaviano, U.S. Navy Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) Information Assurance Project Engineer is particularly interested in the possibilities offered to those with responsibility for monitoring the systems. Lt. Ottaviano expects that this will result in groundbreaking work with respect to the human interface requirements of battlefield tools. Promia's President and CEO, Mr. John Mullen, stated: "This surpasses traditional intrusion detection approaches which work in isolation and are limited in their ability to obtain details from this rich information store. We also believe that this U.S. Navy Awards Promia $7 Million for Internet Security Products component framework can be applied to other kinds of real time data mining problems."
Mr. Mullen noted the importance of Promia using emerging technologies such as Fuzzy Logic and
Neural Networks in this product to create and apply new knowledge about Cyber attacks. Fuzzy Logic computing refers to a branch of artificial intelligence focused in accurate reasoning in a domain with high levels of uncertainty or incomplete data such as is found in the Cyber Warfare arena.
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