As most are aware, our infrastructure continues to be under cyber attack from state-sponsored actors. The Solar Winds hack was the most aggressive and damaging attack to date, affecting government agencies and commercial institutions. It’s clear that our adversaries are sophisticated and are accelerating their desire to disrupt our way of life and our military. Imagine if these cyber attacks are able to dislodge our military assets by taking over the custom devices (FPGA’s, ASIC’s, and SoC’s) that provide the intelligence and communications resources to them? It’s essential that the United States Department of Defense does everything it can to reduce and mitigate this threat.
DARPA has developed an innovative program that significantly lowers the barriers for the Mil/Aero community to begin adopting more hardware security tools and technologies. The program is called the DARPA Toolbox, and it provides those doing “research” in the chip development community with an array of IP and tools to secure these sophisticated devices during design. The goal is to provide the DARPA research community with the ability to begin utilizing these capabilities without having to purchase the licenses on their own while working with the agency. Researchers only need to purchase maintenance and support services during the term. When these research initiatives move to a production state, then production licensing arrangements would be put in place. Throughout this research period, engineers would gain the necessary expertise to fully utilize these “design for security” techniques during a pre-production phase – significantly minimizing the impact to adoption when the team and the research initiative moves into production. Tortuga Logic joins Arm, Rambus and other vendors that have all recently partnered with DARPA to make their security platforms available to the broad Mil/Aero community through the toolbox. Licensing and pricing have both been compressed to make it easy for our research teams to leverage this kind of commercial security technology before these devices get into production.
I encourage all of the companies in our defense industrial base to take advantage of the DARPA Toolbox today.