Training the Cyber Defenders of Tomorrow: The DoD’s Quest for Realistic Automated Adversarie

Application Close Date: December 6, 2024

Application Portal: DIU Submission - ARCADE (Automated Retrainable Cyber Adversaries for Defensive Exercises)

Project Description

The DoD’s 6,000-plus person Cyber Mission Force (CMF) needs a way to deploy realistic, automated cyber adversaries on its training platform to develop and practice the skills required to execute defensive cyber operations missions

Background

The solution should enable training planners to conveniently build an offensive campaign with automated offensive actors, enable more realistic training of defensive teams by emulating the actions and decisions of real, advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, and reduce the manpower costs of having highly-trained, high demand human operators act as adversaries for training scenarios.

The solution should:

• allow training planners to create their own attack campaigns for training either from components (reconnaissance, exploitation, lateral movement, etc.) or from a library of known tactics used by real-life threat actors, based on open source cyber threat intelligence.?The solution should?
• allow for planners to control characteristics of the automated adversaries, such as objectives, level of stealth, etc. and/or have adaptive agents that can learn from their environment and make autonomous decisions based on goal criteria.?
• have an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to allow planners who do not possess first-hand operational tradecraft knowledge to effectively manage adversary behavior and to audit what actions the automated adversaries are taking.

Preference will be given to proposals that demonstrate product maturity and deployment validation.?However, partial solutions that uniquely address specific requirements will be considered, as well as teaming arrangements that combine multiple capabilities to achieve the desired solution.?Solutions would need to be capable of deployment on a closed / air-gapped network.

Eligibility Requirements

Awarding Instrument:

This solicitation will be awarded in accordance with the Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO) process detailed within HQ0845-20-S-C001 (DIU CSO), posted to SAM.gov on 13 Jan 2020, updated 02 Oct 2023. This document can be found here.??

Vendors are reminded that in order to utilize an Other Transaction (OT) agreement the requirements of 10 USC 4022 must be satisfied. Specifically reference 10 USC 4022(d), which requires significant contribution from a nontraditional defense contractor, all participants to be small business concerns, or at least one third of the total cost of the prototype project is to be paid out of funds provided by sources other than the Federal Government.

Follow-on Production:

Companies are advised that any prototype OT agreement awarded in response to this AOI may result in the award of a follow-on production contract or transaction without the use of further competitive procedures. The follow-on production contract or transaction will be available for use by one or more organizations in the Department of Defense and, as a result, the magnitude of the follow-on production contract or agreement could be significantly larger than that of the prototype OT. As such, any prototype OT will include the following statement relative to the potential for follow-on production: "In accordance with 10 U.S.C. 4022(f), and upon a determination that the prototype project for this transaction has been successfully completed, this competitively awarded prototype OT may result in the award of a follow-on production contract or transaction without the use of competitive procedures.”

Awarding Process

Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)