MODIFICATION
A -- Cyber Defensive & Offensive Operations Technology (CDOT)
- Notice Date
- 12/14/2004
- Notice Type
- Modification
- NAICS
- 541710
— Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences
- Contracting Office
- Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514
- ZIP Code
- 13441-4514
- Solicitation Number
- Reference-Number-BAA-03-18-IFKA
- Point of Contact
- Renee Arcuri, Contracting Officer, Phone (315) 330-4777, Fax (315) 330-8094,
- E-Mail Address
-
Renee.Arcuri@rl.af.mil
- Description
- FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Cyber Defensive & Offensive Operations Technology (CDOT) ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 03-18-IFKA CFDA Number: n/a DATES: White papers will be accepted on a continuous basis until 2pm Eastern time on 30 Dec 2008. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. See Section IV of this announcement for further details. I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: AFRL/IF has asserted its leadership role and developed and transitioned products in Information Assurance R&D for a number of years. Most recently, AFRL/IF has expanded this role to address all aspects of Network Combat Operations or Cyber Operations. This BAA is a contracting tool directly responsive to an AFRL/IF Strategic Plan in the technical area of Cyber Operations. The technologies being pursued will provide greater functions and capabilities within the Information Warfare domain and push not only Air Force and DoD needs, but also those of National Security, Homeland Defense and Critical Infrastructure Protection. The technologies endorsed will take into full account the Air Force's move toward transformation. The technology research in the BAA will be focused in the following areas: Covert Cyber Operations; Threat Evaluation, Attack Recognition and Diagnosis; Assured Infostructure Support; Wireless Information Assurance; Complex Systems. II. General Information: The Government may, at its sole discretion, require that research results be documented in a paper suitable for publication in a national and/or international peer-reviewed journal or professional journal. III. Background: The Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate's (AFRL/IF) has developed a responsive Information Warfare Research and Development (R&D) technology program. The objective is to meet the needs of the Air Force's Information Operations doctrine. Specifically, it is focused on Cyber Operations which includes: Information Assurance, Computer Network Defense, Cyber Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and Computer Network Attack ---- Information Assurance (IA) comprises those measures to protect and defend information and information systems by ensuring their availability, integrity, authenticity, confidentiality, and nonrepudiation. ---- Computer Network Defense is actions taken to plan and direct responses to unauthorized activity in defense of Air Force information systems and computer networks. Commanders should provide CND planning guidance to the staff, as well as supporting and subordinate commanders, as part of the "commander's intent." CND actions include analyzing network activity to determine the appropriate course of action (COA) to defend Air Force networks. ---- Computer Network Attack operations are conducted using information systems to disrupt, deny, degrade, or destroy information resident in computers and computer networks, or the computers and networks themselves. ---- Cyber Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) are functions in cyberspace that result in the ability to gather information about the adversary, their intentions, and their capabilities. IV. Objectives: The objective of this BAA is to address highly innovative R&D areas in Cyber Operations. Proposed work should address the innovation and strategic thought of the 21st century adversary, and develop new concepts to counter with innovative information-based capabilities. Further, proposed work should address new concepts for continuously analyzing the information battlespace to identify US vulnerabilities and adversary weaknesses, and develop new defensive and offensive strategies and capabilities accordingly. V. Research Areas: The following section describes several critical technical areas that are a focus under this BAA to receive attention. These areas are high leverage areas that must be worked in order to address the most difficult Air Force requirements, provide the Air Force with the greatest technology push possible, and surface opportunities for contributing to important national security issues such as defending information systems and countering cyber terrorism. A. Covert Cyber Operations. The area of Covert Cyber Operations holds tremendous potential as a major future thrust for AFRL/IF. It is an area that can be described as allowing us access to the cyberspace domain for the purpose of adversary monitoring, intelligence gathering or information-based attack. In order to make the Covert Cyber Operations area a fully functional Air Force capability we must develop effects-based tools that allow us to plan for and achieve the desired effects of a planned cyber operation. For example, deploying effects-based tools that give decision makers lines of reasoning and their respective scenario implications would be valuable addition to the Cyber Operations and conventional warfare arsenal. This gives the decision maker a comprehensive "information set" that presents only useful information and disallows noise. Work is needed in the areas of Cyber ISR and Computer Network Attack (CNA). Cyber ISR entails developing technology for gathering information about the adversary, their intentions, and their capabilities and is necessary for identification and targeting of the adversary in cyberspace. CNA tools and systems that must be developed to penetrate an adversary's detection system and remain hidden until triggered. Cyber Operations interest areas include access, targeting, mission planning, attack effectiveness measures, attack damage assessment, and CNA tool development. B. Threat Evaluation, Attack Recognition and Diagnosis. The threat evaluation, attack recognition and diagnosis area is one that will be of critical importance in the future for not only the Air Force, but also DoD and U.S. critical infrastructures. As discussed above, the Air Force and DoD are building information systems and networks and offering "information services that rely on more complex and larger-scale information networks each year (and more recently, wireless and high speed). It is apparent that it is extremely difficult if not impossible to prevent all attacks against such systems. The ability to recognize attacks, evaluate the threat and diagnose the salient aspects of such attacks becomes a critical issue. New R&D is needed to address aspects of early warning. Early recognition of an adversary information warfare attack means that we must have technology in place that can look across both time and space looking for events that may seem insignificant in isolation but taken together could be laying the foundation for a large-scale attack, such as distributed denial of service. In addition to improving intrusion detection capabilities, tools need to be developed that address correlation and fusion of cyberspace attack indicators. Work also needs to continue in the area of cyberspace visualization and situation awareness to better assist the overloaded operator in attack recognition and diagnosis. Another area of critical importance is cyber forensics and attack assessment. Computer forensics is an area most commonly associated with law enforcement. The R&D proposed in this BAA addresses the gathering of digital evidence for the purpose of "just-in-time" attack assessment in a complex network environment. The need to gather digital evidence in the military information environment is critical as the commander needs accurate, verifiable evidence of who is attacking, what techniques they are using, and where the attacker is located. In addition, accurate digital evidence drives the response whether it is defensive or offensive. Finally, an area of particular importance in the area of threat evaluation, attack recognition and diagnosis concerns the insider threat. The insider threat is one of the most insidious threats facing the implementation and full realization of Network-Centric Warfare technologies. First, a lack of fine-grained security controls on the inside may mean that a malicious insider could gain access to information above their classification level or not within their need-to-know profile. Adding to this, a lack of sufficiently fine-grained auditing tools would make it difficult if not impossible to accurately determine if someone or a group of collaborators are violating the information assurance policy. C. Assured Infostructure Support. The Air Force is an information intensive organization that relies upon a complex, interconnected collection of networks and information systems to carry out its mission. These networks and information systems must have a strong defense against the myriad of threats that we face today and will increase in capability in the future. Since greater attention is being given to resolve operational stovepipes and the need for better systems integration, multi-level security (MLS) and secure mobile code continue to be critical technical areas. Technology is also needed to integrate and reason about both network management and intrusion detection data. Related to the fault tolerance concept and drawing from that discipline is the area of intrusion tolerance. Intrusion tolerance is emerging as one of the most important R&D areas in Cyber Operations today since the systems and networks we depend upon must continue to operate through intrusions and keep operating, albeit in a degraded mode, in spite of a successful adversary information warfare attack. D. Wireless Information Assurance. A key piece of the large-scale information enterprise is the wireless information assurance segment. Wireless networks must exhibit the same functional and IA attributes as wired networks. They must be protected, attacks against these networks must be detected, specifics of successful attacks must be assessed and finally appropriate responses must be carried out. As we move to more and more wireless components becoming a part of the larger network and as wireless networks proliferate we need to be aware that these networks, if improperly understood and configured, could provide a "back-door" into our protected wired enterprise. Intrusion detection for wireless networks must be addressed as well as recovery of wireless services after adversary disruption/denial destruction of friendly networks. Software Defined Radio (SDR) and distributed boundary control technology is needed to allow flexibility in operations and enhanced assured operations. E. Complex Systems. New techniques are needed to that help system engineers to state and reason about the complex relationships of all of the IA products within an organizations information enterprise. An improperly utilized tool, technique or product could invalidate the IA posture of a whole organization. Metrics are needed and an obvious place to start when developing IA metrics is to examine the properties of confidentiality, availability and integrity. A focus for future designs is Biologically Inspired Cyber Operations area. It is an area that holds promise for protection of the enterprise, detection of attacks, response to successful attacks, and even carrying out computer network attacks against an adversary. With the increase of size, interconnectivity, and number of points of access, computer networks have become vulnerable to various forms of information attacks, especially to new sophisticated ones. Biological organisms are also complex and interconnected systems that have many points of access and are vulnerable to sabotage by alien microorganisms. In fact, biological organisms have developed a very successful immune system for detecting, identifying, and destroying most alien intruders. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $24.9M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 04 - $5M; FY 05 - $5M; FY 06 - $5M; FY 07 - $5M and FY08 - $4.9M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 12 to 24 months with dollar amounts ranging between $100,000 to $1M per year. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, or other transactions depending upon the nature of the work proposed. Options are discouraged and unpriced options will not be considered for award. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All potential applicants are eligible. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is subject to foreign disclosure review procedures. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors should immediately contact the contracting office focal point, Lori L. Smith, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-1955 or e-mail Lori.Smith@rl.af.mil for information if they contemplate responding. The e-mail must reference the title and BAA 03-18-IFKA. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITATING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. See Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the Rome "BAA& PRDA: A Guide for Industry," Sep 1996 (Rev), may be accessed at: http://www.if.afrl.af.mil/div/IFK/bp-guide.html. 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit five (5) copies of a white paper, not exceeding ten (10) pages summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Cost of Task, Name of Company; Section B: Task Objective; and Section C: Technical Summary. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict their white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, a fax number, and an e-mail address with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the TECHNICAL POC, as discussed in paragraph five of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: White papers will be accepted on a continuous basis until 2pm Eastern time on 31 Dec 2008. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. Submission of white papers will be regulated in accordance with FAR 15.208. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to ATTN: Thomas Blake, AFRL/IFGB, 525 Brooks Road, Rome, NY, 13441-4505 and reference BAA-03-18-IFKA. V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: Evaluation of proposals will be performed using the following criteria: (1) Soundness of Approach; (2) Relevance to the Mission; (3) Uniqueness of the Approach, and (4) Cost Realism and Reasonableness. Note: Criteria 1 through 3 are of equal importance and Criteria 1 through 3 are more important than Criteria 4. Also, consideration will be given to past and present performance on recent Government contracts, and the capacity and capability to achieve the objectives of this BAA. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. Cost sharing will not be considered in the evaluation. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will be reviewing the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in this contract or order, which do not require the review, reading, or comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a. Assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b. Accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c. Handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Complete instructions for proposal preparation will be forwarded with the invitations for proposal submissions. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after proposal submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: The work to be performed shall not exceed the TOP SECRET classification level. However, proposals may only be submitted at the unclassified or SECRET level. Proposals submitted above this level will not be accepted or considered. 3. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offeror's will be required to submit their reporting requirement through one of our web-based, reporting systems known as JIFFY or TFIMS. Prior to award, the offeror will be notified which reporting system they are to use, and will be given complete instructions regarding their use. VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions prior to the submission of a proposal can be addressed to the technical POCs, Tom Blake/315-330-1482, email: blaket@rl.af.mil or Joseph Giordano, /315-330-1518. email: Joseph.Giordano@rl.af.mil. Questions, clarification, or concerns from offerors or potential offerors during the proposal development phase of this acquisition should be communicated directly to the IFKA Contracting Officer, Lori Smith, telephone (315) 330-1955 or e-mail Lori.Smith@rl.af.mil The email must reference the title and solicitation number of the acquisition.
- Record
- SN00721029-W 20041216/041214211937 (fbodaily.com)
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