Air Force asks industry for enabling technologies in trusted computers and software for the military
ROME, N.Y. – U.S. Air Force researchers are asking industry for trusted computing technologies that enable secure, resilient, affordable command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, and cyber information processing.
Officials of the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate in Rome, N.Y., issued a broad agency announcement on Monday (FA8750-25-S-7001) for the Foundations of Trusted Systems project for military command and control applications.
Researchers are focusing on technologies that support hardware and software for high-assurance, trusted, and secure computers. This announcement is a follow-on to a separate project announced in 2020 also titled Foundations of Trusted Systems (FA8750-20-S-7012).
This project has two technical areas: trusted, secure, and resilient computational systems; and trusted and assured software.
Trusted computers
Trusted, secure, and resilient computational systems seeks to develop elements, tools, and methodologies for trusted, secure and resilient computing, which includes hardware, software, power, cost, performance, and reliability.
Topics of interest include:
-- processor trustworthiness;
-- computer architecture trustworthiness;
-- tools for ensuring trustworthiness of integrated circuits (ICs), as well as defenses against malicious inclusions, side-channel attacks, and probing attacks;
-- data integrity, code protection, and verification;
-- software operating systems to help enable trustworthy computer hardware;
-- tools for ensuring the security of software development, including compilers, assemblers, linkers, binary checks, and source code analysis;
-- software-based assurance designs for implementation in hardware, rather than in software; and
-- Integrated circuit inspection, characterization, and testing for automated post fabrication verification, counterfeit identification, device identification, tampering evidence identification, wear-out characterization, and adaptive system degradation.
Assured software
Trusted and assured software, meanwhile, seeks to lay a foundation of trust across all layers of software development; maintain that trust as the system adapts during its deployment; improve the scalability of interoperable software tools; and to craft a holistic design approach to scale-up the application for formal verification.
Topics of interest include:
-- software assurance to addresses all layers of the supply chain and enterprise including governance, partnerships, process, standards, and education;
-- trusted and resilient software-intensive systems engineering to create self-healing and repair techniques that can fight through cyber attacks, including zero-day attacks;
Related: Trusted computing shields military computers from cyber thieves
-- cyber physical systems to develop the tools that help provide scalability and interoperability necessary to integrate and analyze computational and physical components and the networks connecting them; and
-- artificial intelligence in trusted systems using human-machine teaming to improve automation, raise human understanding, and mitigate the potential risks of bad information or bad decisions from designers.
This project is closed to foreign participation, including foreign ownership and foreign nationals as employees or subcontractors.
Companies interested should email two-to-five-page white papers no later than 18 Dec. 2024 for 2025 projects; by 1 Sept. 2025 for 2026 projects; by 2 Sept. 2026 for 2027 projects; by 3 Sept. 2027 for 2028 projects; and by 4 Sept. 2028 for 2029 projects to the Air Force's Esteban Garcia at [email protected]. Email contractual questions to the Air Force's Amber Buckley at [email protected]. More information is online at https://sam.gov/opp/6a5d1f379ee34a0395eeb98e220c730c/view.
John Keller | Editor-in-Chief
John Keller is the Editor-in-Chief, Military & Aerospace Electronics Magazine--provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronics and optoelectronic technologies in military, space and commercial aviation applications. John has been a member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since 1989 and chief editor since 1995.
