AiRANACULUS, a private, Massachusetts-based technology company providing early stage research, development, prototyping and consulting services, announced it has been awarded a US intelligence agency contract for enhanced communications security.
The company was selected by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. IARPA invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to address the most difficult challenges within the intelligence community.
While advances in communications infrastructure in both government and the private sector can provide a relatively high level of security within controlled facilities, data security “in the wild” has become a much more challenging problem. The IARPA program is focused on identifying unexpected radio frequency (RF) transmissions to detect attempted data breaches. The project will require development of new smart radio techniques to enable monitoring of RF emissions across a wide range of frequencies at data rates that can approach terabytes per second.
Under its new contract, AiRANACULUS will develop a platform to automatically detect and characterize suspicious signals and other anomalies in complex RF environments. The platform will incorporate innovative signal processing and machine learning techniques to rapidly identify a broad range of overt and surreptitious emissions using external characteristics (e.g., strength, frequency) of the RF signals themselves.
AiRANACULUS will be assisted by NorthWest Research Associates and Pelorus LLC. The team will leverage state-of-the-art research being carried out at Northeastern University, University of California at Los Angeles, and Oregon State University.
If fully funded across the three-phase, 42-month project plan, the contract will be valued at more than $10M.
