Top Pentagon research arm combats ‘aggressive’ foreign investors March 16 Tendon and ligament injuries are common for military members, and Embody medical company received DARPA funds to push to market its improved surgical graft for soft tissue repairs. (DARPA) WASHINGTON The Pentagon’s lead innovation office expanded its business accelerator to compete against “aggressive” foreign investment possibly tied to unfriendly governments and instead is courting U.S. investors to push its desired products to market. The goal for the accelerator, established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is to move 150 technologies out of the lab and into the marketplace over the next five years. The effort is part of an expansion of DARPA’s Embedded Entrepreneurship Initiative pilot program that helped raise more than $100 million for 30 research teams.
SEAKR Engineering Awarded $60M for DARPA s Blackjack Satellite Data Project Our Bureau 1430
Artist s concept of DARPA s Blackjack project
SEAKR Engineering Inc. has won Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s Blackjack contract valued $60.5 million.
The Blackjack program aims to demonstrate a global high-speed communications network in low-earth-orbit (LEO) to replace expensive geo-synchronous orbiting satellites that will provide the U.S. DoD connected, autonomous, and persistent coverage employing multiple payload types and missions.
“SEAKR Engineering Inc., has been awarded a $60.5 million contract for the Blackjack Pit Boss Phase Two and Phase Three program. Work will be performed in Centennial, Colorado, with an estimated completion date of March 2022,” a recent U.S. DoD release said.
DARPA Seeks Chips that Can Crunch Data Without Decrypting It
Current methods of doing fully homomorphic encryption require too much computing power to be used widely.
The Defense Advanced Research Agency awarded four research teams multimillion-dollar contracts to figure out how to perform computations on encrypted data faster and with less power.
The four performers for DARPA’s Data Protection in Virtual Environments program aim to build silicon chips capable of supporting Fully Homomorphic Encryption, which enables users to compute and analyze data without exposing it to compromise by decrypting it. FHE still requires far too much compute overhead to be considered a practical option, so DPRIVE performers will create brand new chips specialized for FHE.
By
Kelsey Atherton on March 11, 2021 at 11:15 AM
Keeping data encrypted as it is processed could mitigate the harm from cyber intrusions, even by determined adversaries.
ALBUQUERQUE: This week, DARPA announced the award of several contracts that will let computers process encrypted data, instead of having to decrypt it prior to processing. That could drastically improve the security and functionality of cloud-based processing for the military, because data won’t have to switch constantly between being protected encrypted forms and vulnerable decrypted ones.
On March 8, DARPA announced the award of contracts to four research teams for the Under the Data Protection in Virtual Environments (DPRIVE) program. These teams will be led by Duality Technologies, Galois, SRI International, and Intel Federal, and will each be responsible for developing both the hardware and the software that allows for encrypted processing at speed.