Engaged ASU in defense solutions

The Global Security Initiative contributed to ASU’s increased engagement in solving defense challenges. Since the initiative’s founding in 2015, ASU has more than doubled its research spending funded by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Over the last 10 years, GSI has built relationships with the DOD and other federal agencies and helped ASU researchers write effective proposals and secure grants. In addition, the institute’s researchers and centers have earned many grants of their own to develop national security solutions.

Brokering defense research

As GSI helped ASU grow its defense portfolio, it paved the way for the university’s most recent recognition — selection to provide reputable academic research support to the DOD Irregular Warfare Center. Working closely with the DOD, this research will seek to better understand current and emerging global trends in nontraditional warfare. So far, it is the biggest DOD award managed by GSI, with an anticipated $24 million over five years.

Irregular warfare refers to a broad spectrum of missions and activities that are often indirect and non-attributable, including unconventional warfare. The ASU-supported effort represents an intellectual investment to ensure America can compete effectively in this unseen arena.

GSI also helped connect Hongbin Yu, a professor of electrical engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, to a research opportunity with DARPA. With GSI’s proposal guidance, Yu’s team received a $1.5 million grant as part of the NextGeneration Microelectronics Manufacturing program. The team recommended ways to manufacture new, more efficient chip technology called 3D heterogeneously integrated microelectronics in the U.S.

GSI, as the university’s primary interface to the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community, works closely with faculty and academic units across the university to amplify ASU’s engagement in defense challenges. GSI provides tailored training to researchers new to national security sponsors, helps shape concepts to meet defense mission needs, and connects faculty with potential research sponsors.

Past DARPA projects at ASU include a brain-drone swarm control interface; wearable exo suits, including a jet pack that helps wearers run faster; and robot swarms that can perform a task in unpredictable environments where comms and GPS don’t work well.

Protecting software from cyberattacks

GSI’s scientists were also instrumental in getting ASU involved in multi-university defense research projects.

In 2017, researchers from ASU joined five other universities to bring the age-old concept, “know your enemy,” to digital battlefields to combat advanced persistent cyber threats and other forms of cyber malfeasance.

The project brought together experts in computer science, cybersecurity, game theory and cognition to conduct research on defending against cyberattacks by profiling the attackers.

It was supported by a $6.2 million Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative award, granted to the six partnering universities by the Army Research Office.

Nancy Cooke, the senior scientific advisor for the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence and Robot Teaming, explained the aim of the project in simple terms: “We’re trying to deceive the deceiver.” Cooke is also a professor of human systems engineering at ASU’s Polytechnic School.

Cooke’s role was to gather data on human behavior using her Cyber Defense Exercises for Team Awareness Research simulator. The lab, which seats six people, simulated cyberattack and defense scenarios for participating graduate students that Cooke used to gather data.

That data went to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, who in turn created cognitive models of decision-making by attackers.

“What we’re doing is developing a personalized form of deception,” Cooke said. “We try to understand the attacker. Instead of using a generalized honeypot, we specialize the offense against them, creating an environment in which they don’t know what’s real and what’s not.”

In 2019, GSI helped secure ASU another spot in a multiuniversity defense project. DARPA gave $11.7 million to support the Cognitive Human Enhancements for Cyber Reasoning Systems (CHECRS) project. The project’s goal was to create a human-assisted autonomous tool that can find and analyze software vulnerabilities and also learn from its interactions with humans.

GSI helped the ASU team win $6.6 million of the award funding, and its researchers supported the team’s work. Ruoyu “Fish” Wang, the associate director of impact in GSI’s Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations, led the ASU team.

“While modern automated tools run on computers that calculate billions of times faster than a human brain, human security analysts still find the majority of software vulnerabilities,” Wang said. “This is because the knowledge and intuition that humans possess outweigh the speed of calculation when facing problems with extreme complexity, for example, finding software vulnerabilities.”

The CHECRS team wanted to create an autonomous tool that can be used by a variety of human assistants, not just cybersecurity experts. When humans of varying skills and expertise are at work, or when the machine needs help connecting dots using intuition, the automated tool can delegate tasks it’s not good at to the humans while it switches over to other tasks computers are optimized to perform.

Not only do humans help in the moment, but the automated tool also will incorporate what it learns from human contributions to continuously improve upon itself — both in how it interacts with its human partners and in its own ability to accomplish tasks.