Cyber Operations, Analysis, and Research

In October, the COAR team launched an initial collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, Ratheon BBN, and Florida Institute of Technology to test our Multiple OS Rotational Environment for Moving Target Defense (MORE MTD) technology. MORE is a rotational environment that runs an application on several different OS platforms to thwart attacker reconnaissance efforts and improve application resilience to the threat of zero day exploits. Read more about our Moving Target Defense technologies here.

COAR team members Amanda Joyce and Nate Evans published an article entitled, "International Cyber Incident Repository System: Information Sharing on a Global Scale" in the George Mason University's September/October Cybersecurity focused CIP Report. The CIP Report is a digital collection of articles written by various industry, government, academia, and national laboratories. The article looks to highlight the current information/intelligence sharing landscape and looks to propose a global cyber incident sharing system. This system would allow for a more global look at intelligence sharing in a controlled environment. To read the whole article, please visit: International Cyber Incident Repository System: Information Sharing on a Global Scale.

Modern cloud environments offer cheap access to virtual private servers (VPS) by sharing a server's hardware to run multiple operating system instances on a single machine using virtualization software. One role of the virtualization software is to ensure the separation of resources between VPS instances to ensure each VPS acts as if it had its own physical hardware. While this separation is adequately maintained under normal operating conditions, hardware vulnerabilities in RAM such as Rowhammer can be exploited to allow one attacker VPS to manipulate data on another VPS hosted on the same server without explicit permission from the virtualization software.

COAR team member Mike Thompson along with graduate research associate Charity King published an article entitled, "Security of Electronic Voting in the United States" in the George Mason University's September/October Cybersecurity focused CIP Report. The CIP Report is a digital collection of articles written by various industry, government, academia, and national laboratories. The article looks to highlight the current high-profile 2016 presidential election and the potential for a cyber attack to disrupt or alter the data within voting machines. It summarizes that while a single cyber attack would be unlikely to bring down all the voting machines within the United States, any attack would impact the confidence level of the election. The article goes into the current landscape of voting machines and how industry manufacturers of the voting machine have drastically changed within the last decade. To read the whole article, please visit: Security of Electronic Voting in the United States.