SPECIAL NOTICE
A -- Request For Information (RFI)-HECTOR - IARPA-RFI-17-03-HECTOR PROGRAM
- Notice Date
- 5/31/2017
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 541712
— Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Biotechnology)
- Contracting Office
- Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Washington, District of Columbia, 20511, United States
- ZIP Code
- 20511
- Solicitation Number
- IARPA-RFI-17-03
- Archive Date
- 8/31/2017
- Point of Contact
- Dr. Mark I. Heilgman,
- E-Mail Address
-
dni-iarpa-rfi-17-03@iarpa.gov
(dni-iarpa-rfi-17-03@iarpa.gov)
- Small Business Set-Aside
- N/A
- Description
- IARPA-RFI-17-03-HECTOR PROGRAM The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is seeking information on potential use-cases and associated challenge problems that could be enabled by advanced cryptographic techniques and application development systems facilitating their use, as well as techniques and challenges around building such application development systems. Use cases of particular interest will be realistic and provide measurable benefits to the intelligence community, other government entities and to the public with respect to automated policy compliance enforcement and verification, and protection of privacy or data in general. Imaginative use cases that currently appear to be infeasible might be enabled by the new technology and cryptographic methods. Specifically of interest is computing on data belonging to different – potentially­ mutually distrusting – parties, which are unwilling or unable (e.g., due to laws and regulations) to share this data with each other or with the underlying compute platform. Such computations may include oblivious verification mechanisms to prove the correctness and security of computation without revealing underlying data, sensitive computations, or both. Responses are also encouraged to highlight challenges to supporting use cases and deploying such tools and methods. This request for information (RFI) is issued solely for information gathering and planning purposes; this RFI does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals. The following sections of this announcement contain details of the scope of technical efforts of interest, along with instructions for the submission of responses. Background & Scope The past decades have witnessed great strides in the development of cryptographic techniques to compute on encrypted or otherwise hidden data, to include fully and partially homomorphic encryption, secure multiparty computation, oblivious RAM, verifiable computation and zero-knowledge proofs. These techniques, if made practical, allow for the ability to securely protect data while under process on computing platforms that cannot be fully trusted, and to collaboratively engage in computations with untrusted parties while obtaining some guarantees as to the integrity of the outputs. For example, potential use cases include sending private information under encryption to the cloud or to other less trusted parties to have them compute on the data and return answers without ever decrypting or recovering the underlying data, thus reaping significant privacy gains. Other applications include so-called oblivious verification, where certain activities can be verified without revealing related, but sensitive, information – for example, registering an encrypted password with a local system while proving to an external third party that the password follows a particular password policy, without ever revealing the actual password. While the theoretical cryptography gains have been significant, in practice, implementing cryptographic solutions efficiently and correctly often requires highly specialized knowledge and is extremely difficult. To overcome these issues, IARPA is considering a program, HECTOR, which seeks to facilitate design of highly secure distributed applications and to minimize cryptographic expertise required for these implementations, and will accomplish this by creating a new development stack containing specialized compilers and programming languages, as well as cryptographic libraries implementing both existing and new/improved protocols. The proposers’ day for the HECTOR program is being announced on FBO.gov under IARPA-BAA-17-05. The goal will be to bring together compiler, programming language, and cryptography researchers to work together on all aspects of the program to create a unified result. This integration is crucial and necessitates research approaches that support a multi-disciplinary effort, including working together to standardize highly technical details in each academic field. For instance, cryptographers will need to work with compiler and programming language researchers to develop a mechanism flexible enough to encompass multiple forms of secure computation, e.g., garbled circuits, homomorphic encryption, oblivious RAM, etc. IARPA intends to measure the utility of proposed solutions by trying to solve IARPA-furnished challenge problems. An example challenge problem might be to perform various properly authorized statistical analyses on census data without compromising privacy of any individuals (i.e., without revealing to the researchers any data other than the result of the authorized statistical analysis). While some of these sample challenge problems will be furnished to performers at the start of the program, many others will be provided after the performers will have been selected, with some of the challenge problems supplied at various stages throughout the program. Therefore, proposed and subsequently developed technical solutions must be highly flexible to address these challenge problems provided after the tools have been developed. (SEE ATTACHED FOR COMPLETE DESCRIPTION AND INSTRUCTIONS)
- Web Link
-
FBO.gov Permalink
(https://www.fbo.gov/notices/d89b1089113acb2a6a2fe56f014664e7)
- Record
- SN04527625-W 20170602/170531235827-d89b1089113acb2a6a2fe56f014664e7 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
-
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