Tactical Networks and Systems are becoming increasingly important in critical environments such as military and/or civilian operations and disaster relief missions. Often, these tactical environments lack a centralized electronic network infrastructure that can coordinate and enforce security policies and practices. In such scenarios, the critical need to combine communication resources and capabilities often creates vulnerabilities that can compromise the mission in unforeseen and potentially devastating ways.

Future infrastructures will be adaptive in the sense that they will not only comply with security policies established at the time of deployment, but they will also allow systems to autonomously learn, by example, about acceptable changes in configuration and applications. Policies and trust inferences will be based on distributed similarity estimates within hierarchical functional groups which are autonomously formed as nodes exchange information about their configuration and state. These self-regulating and self-healing infrastructures will provide the much needed flexibility and robustness to enable system security and information assurance capabilities for future military and civilian tactical infrastructures.

To realize this vision, researchers at IHMC are developing a biologically-inspired sSecurity Infrastructure to enforce and maintain security policies, configuration and application integrity in networked tactical systems. This approach combines previous research in Artificial Immune Systems with new theories and techniques involving Danger Theory (DT), autonomous damage detection and context-dependent reputation systems.

Our research in the areas of Security and Information Assurance also includes the protection of the Nation's critical infrastructure and cyber infrastructures. For that domain, IHMC is creating distributed security frameworks that use intelligent mobile agents as permanent roaming security guards for plant and network monitoring and protection.