Abstract

Department of Defense (DOD) use of commercial networks entails unprecedented reliance on untrusted third-party communications infrastructure, and the associated risk of exposing DOD communications to an adversary. Traversing adversary-controlled infrastructure allows DOD’s adversaries to recognize, disrupt, or extract intelligence even from encrypted communications. The resulting arms race of obfuscation vs intelligence techniques has an inherent limitation: with each new obfuscation, DOD can never know if it fools the adversary, or if the adversary is simply lulling DOD into a false sense of security.We believe the next great capability leap for operating through commercial networks will likely come from sophisticated analytics that provide situational awareness of the threats within the communications infrastructure, and implementations that dynamically route communications along benign paths. These …

Date

October 28, 2024

Authors

Alexander Marder, Jon Larrea, Kc Claffy, Erik Kline, Kyle Jamieson, Bradley Huffaker, Lincoln Thurlow, Matthew Luckie

Conference

MILCOM 2024-2024 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM)

Pages

1106-1111

Publisher

IEEE