SBIR-STTR Award

Warfighters and their systems require information resilience, including complete situational awareness with respect to their information landscape. Resilience considerations include information provenance, value, and reconstitution ability in difficult environments consisting of relentless cyber assaults, mobile data sources, and degraded, intermittent, and low-bandwidth (DIL) connectivity. To provision missions with information resilience, Securboration proposes to develop the Provisioning Resilience through Informational-Value Metadata (PRIM) system. The key innovation in PRIM is the application of block chain enabled Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to maintain a complete, immutable, record of information value, provenance and usage that enables reconstitution for mission critical data. These information relationships are formalized and automatically enforced using Smart Contracts. PRIM addresses providing resilience for various mission critical systems from an informational value (IV) perspective. It recognizes that we live in an age where information resilience strategies need to be bolted right when provisioning of the information resources take placeto assure success of mission critical systems even in compromised environments. PRIM project sits at the confluence of three cutting edge technologiescombat cloud, DLT and Metadata extraction and provisioning - which are in various stages of evolution and are germane to the development of PRIM.Distributed ledger technology (DLT),Smart Contracts,Datalakes,DIL,Combat Cloud,Information criticality,metadata,Informational Value

As the Air Force seeks to transition operations to the combat cloud and achieve a distributed execution environment, there is critical need to provision missions with secure Information Resilience (IR) that enables C2 of assets operating in degraded, intermittent, and low-bandwidth (DIL) environments. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) provides data resiliency through peer-to-peer logging and information tracking, forming a secure decentralized database managed by ledger participants with no centralized authority. While DLT continues to grow in areas such as Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance, current implementations are not equipped to address Air Force needs to assure C2 in DIL environments. Securboration, teaming with commercial DLT experts Consult Hyperion (CHYP), designed a DLT-based solution called PRIM - (Provisioning Resilience through Informational-Value Metadata) in Phase I. We identified the major challenges in DIL-affected combat cloud operations and formulated a set of functional requirements and architecture that we will implement in Phase II. The goal is to determine if DLT is viable to (1) operate in the background, adding C2 messages to the ledger while communications are not compromised, and (2) reconstitute the latest received C2 messages as an asset encounters DIL communications and use them to support the C2 Chain of Command.