DoD to Release Public Version of Cyber Strategy

The U.S. Defense Department is hoping to drive the development of cyber war-fighting tools that will give itself new advantages on virtual battlegrounds.
Next week, the Pentagon will release an unclassified version of its much-anticipated cyber war-fighting strategy. Finalized several months ago, the strategy calls for treating cyberspace as a domain in which the military needs to be able to operate and defend U.S. interests, according to Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn.

"To do that … a military organization needs some sort of command structure to organize, train and equip the forces," Lynn said during a July 8 interview at the Pentagon.
Cyber security and the damage of attacks have become more frequently discussed by senior defense officials in recent years. Attacks can originate from virtually any computer with a network connection, and it is often difficult to trace their origins.
DoD is going to spend more on cyber technology and train its personnel better, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, said this week.
"The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber," Mullen said during a July 7 taping of This Week in Defense News. "I think we're going to have to focus a lot more on it."
DoD's strategy has also helped increase cyber-aligned resources, including nearly $500 million into the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), according to Lynn.
"In draft form, we've used that strategy to build a stronger program and budget," he said. "Then we've used what we're doing here as a platform to reach out in the interagency process to help drive the legislative initiatives, as well as to develop a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, to work with them to think about how we're going to extend protections to critical infrastructure."
The strategy also calls on DoD "to utilize our advantages in technology to maintain our military strength that's dependent on information technology," Lynn said.
"In particular, over time, we're looking to change the balance between offense and defense in the Internet," he said. "Right now, the attacker has all the advantages and the defender is constantly playing catch up."
But DoD thinks it can get a leg up on this trend.
"We think you can make long-term … five- to 10-year technology investments where you might be able to change that balance so then you can impose more costs on the attacker," Lynn said.
To that end, DARPA and industry are exploring encrypting stored data so even if a computer gets hacked, the data is still protected. This type of encryption would provide "more balance between attacker and defender," according to Lynn.
"The challenge with that is you can do that now, but it really slows processing time," he said.
Although Lynn does not expect DoD to be "the dominant source of funding for this kind of stuff," he believes the Pentagon can "cede important investments" similar to the way it did with high-performance computing in the past.