Autonomous Resilient Cyber Defence (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 Frazer-Nash Consultancy, and provides the cyber-defence agents. Agents are Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning products that are capable of responding to a cyber incident. Find out more information here.
- Track 2 is delivered by QinetiQ and QTSL 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.
ARCD is being supplied by suppliers on Lots 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Serapis framework.
Under Task 2 of Track 2, a number of State of the Art (SOTA) Reports were commissioned by QinetiQ. The reports were looking to answer a number of research questions.