Navy seeks cyber research proposals

The Office of Naval Research plans to award more than $14.5 million through fiscal 2012 for scientific research that could lead to advances in software engineering, networks, critical infrastructure or social networks, the ONR said today.

The research would be used for the Navy’s future information infrastructure that officials expect to be highly mobile, dynamic, nonstop and large-scale and operating over many networks, the ONR said in a broad agency announcement posted today on the Federal Business Opportunities Web site. The office also wants research from industry and academia on “cyber-physical interaction spaces” caused by advances in networking and software-enabled devices, the announcement states.

“ONR believes that significant fundamental advances can be achieved through research at the intersection of computer science, the natural sciences and social sciences. There are many research opportunities and challenges we anticipate in this area,” ONR said.

Full research proposals are due Aug. 27 with awards to be made in lump sums of $100,000 to $450,000 per year, according to the notice. The awards are meant for academia and industry, but Federally Funded Research & Development Centers can participate as part of a team, ONR said.

The Navy is interested in research on:

• New models of computation and system architectures for cooperative cyber defense.
• Insights for effective control of systems to produce trustworthy results.
• New metrics for comparing computation in networked environments. 
• Automated ways to define architectures for embedded real-time systems. 
• Critical principles for new host architectures, focused on information assurance, manageability and agility.