Amida Awarded Option Year Renewal of Navy SBIR

WASHINGTON - Oct. 29, 2020 - PRLog -- Amida Technology Solutions, Inc., today announced that it has been awarded an option year renewal for its Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract with the U.S. Department of the Navy to study Cyber Threat Insertion and Evaluation Technology for Navy Ship Control Systems. The research addresses vulnerabilities in military hardware that can be exploited by adversaries.

National security infrastructure typically relies on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware manufactured or assembled in countries that lack strong trust relationships with the defense services of the U.S. government. Devices can have malicious elements hidden inside that represent cybersecurity vulnerabilities, such as code infiltration (malware, spyware, virus), data exfiltration (data theft, reverse engineering), a kill switch (prevention of use, damage and destruction), a ransomware attack (takeover by a third party), or unreliable operation (real or spoofed faults, defects, and errors).

Amida's solution identifies behavioral signatures of hardware Trojans through emulation of pristine systems in a sandbox environment, deliberate infection of those systems with a Trojan, and the study and classification of anomalous system behavior.

"We've already shown that it is possible to detect anomalous behavior from Trojans, which mathematically is far more difficult than finding a needle in a haystack" said Alfred Crouch, Amida's Director of Hardware Engineering. "Now we are working to show how it is possible to countermeasure or harden military hardware against attacks."

"The Trojan emulation and exploration environment can be used to test weaknesses in any critical system," said Jim Hogan, a member of Amida's board of directors. "The implications are broad, not only for Naval platforms, but also for medical devices, autonomous vehicles, industrial control systems, computer processors, and conceivably any device that is vulnerable to attack."

About Amida

Amida is an open source software and IT services company. Amida's founders, core team, and close advisors are internationally recognized data scientists and highly qualified software engineers. They have extensive experience in data management and are experts in standards, models, security, and governance. Amida's clients include Fortune 500 companies, multi-billion-dollar government agencies, and internationally recognized NGOs. Learn more about Amida at https://www.amida.com