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Autonomous Resilient Cyber Defence (ARCD) “Show and Tell” Industry Day

02/02/2023

On Wednesday 25 January, QinetiQ hosted an Autonomous Resilient Cyber Defence (ARCD) “Show and Tell” Industry Day alongside the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) and Frazer-Nash Consultancy. 

ARCD is a multi-year programme from Dstl to develop and demonstrate self-defending and self-recovering concepts for military platforms and networks in the face of increasingly complex cyber-attacks. 

The programme is being delivered in two tracks:

  • Track 1 is delivered by Fraser Nash Consulting, and provides the cyber-defence agents. Agents are Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning products that are capable of responding to a cyber incident.
  • Track 2 is delivered by QinetiQ and responsible for performing experimentation and evaluation of the agent performance. It provides the environments to train, evaluate and demonstrate the agents; the evaluation schemes and tools to measure the performance and measures of effectiveness of the agents; and an actuation and integration capability to provide agent, environment and evaluation orchestration.

By ensuring that military platforms can automatically identify and defend themselves against cyber-attacks, this reduces the need for human intervention and ensures a quicker response time. This will therefore limit risk of the platform being compromised and ultimately protect the sailors, airman and soldiers who use them.

It was a great day with over 120 people in attendance. The event enabled all current suppliers on Lots 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Serapis framework, which is how ARCD is being delivered, to show each other what work they have been delivering to Track 1 and Track 2. It was also an opportunity for those who are on the framework but have not yet engaged a chance to see what is being delivered, and for those who are not on the framework a chance to see what ARCD is about and whether they want to join. The Track and Task leads from Fraser Nash Consulting and QinetiQ also had the opportunity to explain how the next six-months of work is shaping up.

Autonomous Resilient Cyber Defence event

There is a desire for more organisations to join the framework and the hope is that this event has created relationships to do that. We are pleased that a number of suppliers indicated that they were now planning to join the framework as a key outcome of ARCD is to develop the UK skills base in this ground breaking capability. 

If you are interesting in finding out more information or would like to join the framework, please email ARCD-Track2@qinetiq.com.

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