DARPA’s plan for US military superiority in cyberspace

The US military will never be completely hack proof, admits the director of the Pentagon’s futuristic research arm. “Invulnerability is not a future state,” says Arati Prabhakar, head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA’s mission is to develop breakthrough technologies to help the US military. It’s the influential agency that fueled the creation of the Internet in the first place. Yet the asymmetrical nature of digital conflict means increasingly sophisticated hackers will always pose a threat, no matter how advanced the solutions become -- even the ones DARPA is developing. That’s because “human beings are so creative,” Dr. Prabhakar said. This, however, is not stopping DARPA from trying to shift the balance. “We have to change the cybersecurity game we’re in right now,” Prabhakar said. “All the prowess of our conventional capabilities is meaningless in this environment.”

It’s a critical problem for the US military. Its superiority, military leaders lament, does not carry over from the traditional battlefield into cyberspace. Several in-progress DARPA projects could ultimately give the US military the upper hand, Prabhakar said. A program known as Plan X, for example, is designed to give the military’s cyberwarriors greater visibility into their networks. It would translate attacks into smart display graphics, so they’re harder to miss, and streamline the military’s ability to defend against them by building an “app store” where cyberoperations could stored, ready to deploy. Prabhakar is optimistic that the US military can ultimately develop an edge over other countries, even if it will never be totally impenetrable.