Secondo il Washington Post la DARPA, con un ampio coinvolgimento del settore privato, starebbe sviluppando un programma di ricerca, soprannominato “Plan X”, che tra le altre cose punterebbe a sviluppare tecnologie per la mappatura in tempo reale del campo di battaglia digitale rappresentato dall’intero cyber-spazio. Insomma, un potente strumento per un conflitto nella quinta dimensione.
The five-year, $110 million research program will begin seeking proposals this summer. Among the goals will be the creation of an advanced map that details the entirety of cyberspace — a global domain that includestens of billions of computers and other devices — and updates itself continuously. Such a map would help commanders identify targets and disable them using computer code delivered through the Internet or other means.
Another goal is the creation of a robust operating system capable of launching attacks and surviving counterattacks. Officials say this would be the cyberspace equivalent of an armored tank; they compare existing computer operating systems to sport-utility vehicles — well suited to peaceful highways but too vulnerable to work on battlefields.
The architects of Plan X also hope to develop systems that could give commanders the ability to carry out speed-of-light attacks and counterattacks using preplanned scenarios that do not involve human operators manually typing in code — a process considered much too slow.[…]
Unlike espionage, military cyberattacks would be aimed at achieving a physical effect — disrupting or shutting down a computer, for example — and probably would be carried out by the U.S. Cyber Command, the organization that was launched in 2010 next to the NSA at Fort Meade.
“Because the origins of cyberattack have been in the intelligence community, there’s a tendency to believe that simply doing more of what they’re doing will get us what we need,” said Kaigham J. Gabriel, acting director of DARPA. “That’s not the way we see it. There’s a different speed, scale and range of capabilities that you need. No matter how much red you buy, it’s not orange.”
Plan X is part of a larger DARPA effort begun several years ago to create breakthrough offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities.[…]
A digital battlefield map, as DARPA envisions it, would plot nodes on the Internet, drawing from a variety of sources and changing as cyberspace changes.
“In a split microsecond you could have a completely different flow of information and set of nodes,” Gabriel said. “The challenge and the opportunity is to create a capability where you’re always getting a rapid, high-order look of what the Internet looks like — of what the cyberspace looks like at any one point in time.”
The ideal map would show network connections, analyze how much capacity a particular route has for carrying a cyberweapon and suggest alternative routes according to traffic flows, among other things.
The goal would be a visual representation of cyberspace that could help commanders make decisions on what to attack and how, while seeing any attacks coming from an enemy. Achieving this will require an enormous amount of upfront intelligence work, experts say. […]
Plan X also envisions the development of technology that enables a commander to plan, launch and control cyberattacks. A commander wanting to hit a computer that controls a target — a strategically important drawbridge in enemy territory, for example — should be able to predict and quantify battle damage while considering the timing or other constraints on a possible attack, said Dan Roelker, Plan X program manager.