A glance through the list of current and past research projects at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) reveals a government agency with a sense of humor. Recent project acronyms include MAHEM (Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition), EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordinance), and NACHOS (Network Architecture and Coalition of Hops). The creative naming convention, however, belies a critical decades-old mission to pioneer advanced technologies in service to our national security and freedom-focused initiatives across the globe.
Computer Science Professor and Department Chair Chris Skalka and Associate Professor Joe Near have recently been tapped to join a new DARPA initiative that will take advantage of their unique strengths in data privacy and cybersecurity. Titled PWND2: Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection*, the project seeks to aid those living under oppressive regimes where internet access is curtailed or censored and online activity is closely monitored.
The project brief defines “weird networks” as covert or emergent communication pathways that can be difficult to detect or characterize using traditional networking methods. Most existing hidden communications systems are designed manually with ad-hoc techniques and deployed with minimal testing or guarantees that the network is secure.
“If we’re successful, I envision the creation of a new science of hidden networks,” said Michael Lack, DARPA program manager for PWND2, in a recent interview. “What’s traditionally been an artisan-driven process, i.e., literally clever people in a room coming up with clever ideas, can be transformed using mathematical rigor to provide greater confidence when deploying a network with a clear understanding of the tradeoffs between performance and privacy.”
The need for “mathematical rigor” is where professors Skalka and Near step in to develop advanced analysis techniques to best determine the properties of the hidden networks.
“There's been this escalating arms race to develop networks to circumvent censorship that are harder to detect and therefore harder to block,” said Near. “Our research is not about building new weird networks, but rather about developing open-source tools to evaluate the network’s properties and, ultimately, create proofs about what happens when you run a program.”
Skalka and Near will be contributing to the project as part of a larger team led by Stealth Software Incorporated. Founded in 2006 by UCLA cryptography researchers and software developers, Stealth has partnered with DARPA on a number of projects, including the immediate predecessor of PWND2, a program called Resilient Anonymous Communication for Everyone (RACE) that developed secure technologies for distributed messaging systems. DARPA seeks to go beyond empirical testing with the PWND2 program to provide mathematically provable guarantees about the privacy and performance of obfuscated channels.
To determine “provably” weird networks, the team will explore whether software-defined networking approaches paired with formal methods—mathematical techniques for designing, analyzing, and verifying systems—can provide provable privacy and performance guarantees for hidden communication systems, fundamentally improving the deployment and detection of robust and resilient hidden networks.
“This is an exciting project at the leading edge of free speech on the internet. The collaboration with Stealth and DARPA demonstrates the impact and unique research strengths of our UVM CS Faculty and students, especially in security and privacy in distributed systems."
— Computer Science Professor and Department Chair Chris Skalka
Launched as a 30-month, single-phase program, the funding for the PWND² project at UVM will help cover three graduate students who will be working on several project elements, including mathematical algorithms and open-source software. Professors Near and Skalka anticipate that the research will be included in several future PhD theses.
Created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957, DARPA is an independent research and development agency within the United States Department of Defense (DOD) whose mission is "to create technological surprise for U.S. national security." While most DARPA research programs have a national security origin, the resulting tools and technologies often find their way into the private sector. Consumer-sized GPS receivers, automated voice recognition and language translation, and the internet as we know it today have all benefited from DARPA-led research.
* PWN is a commonly used term in video gaming, meaning to dominate and defeat (someone or something). The DARPA program acronym PWND2 is phonetically pronounced as “doubly powned.”