In FY 2009, in response to the President’s call to secure our nation’s cyber infrastructure, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the NITRD Program Senior Steering Group (SSG) for Cybersecurity R&D developed the Leap-Ahead Initiative with the goal of developing a national cybersecurity leap-ahead R&D agenda. We began by asking the technical community to propose plausible changes to the current cybersecurity landscape. Some 238 responses were submitted via three Requests for Inputs. Our synthesis of all the ideas presented led us to identify five categories that demonstrate game-changing potential:
- Digital Provenance → basing trust decisions on verified assertions
- Moving-target Defense → attacks only work once if at all
- Hardware-enabled Trust → knowing when we’ve been had
- Health-inspired Network Defense → move from forensics to real-time diagnosis
- Cyber Economics → crime doesn’t pay
For those interested, all non-proprietary inputs submitted to the National Cyber Leap Year via the RFI process can be accessed by downloading this portfolio file: NCLY_Submissions_Public.pdf.
National Cyber Leap Year Background: NCLY Background Presentation
National Cyber Leap Year Summit
The five categories were explored at the NCLY Summit held in August 17-19, 2009, in Arlington, Virginia. Invited Summit participants examined the forces of progress and inertia and recommended the most productive ways to induce the new games to materialize over the next decade. The Summit’s outcomes are provided as input to the Administration’s cybersecurity R&D agenda and as strategies for public-private actions to secure the Nation’s digital future.