Intrinsic Cognitive Security (ICS)
DOD-DARPA-I2O
Status:
Active
October 16, 2023
Posted:
Deadline:
April 12, 2024
Funding
Program:
Award Floor:
Ceiling:
Match Required?
No
Eligibility
All
States:
Entity Types:
City or township governments, County governments, State governments, Nonprofits (with 501(c)(3) status), Individuals
The Intrinsic Cognitive Security (ICS) program develops computational science to build tactical
mixed reality systems that protect human users against cognitive attacks. The core technical
hypothesis of the program is that formal methods can be extended with cognitive guarantees and
models to protect mixed reality users from cognitive attacks. Mixed reality (MR) integrates
virtual and real worlds in real-time and will be ubiquitous in future military missions, including
missions involving dismounted soldiers. Users of MR systems will be vulnerable to a wide
variety of adversary attacks that exploit the intimate connection between users and MR
equipment, such as information flooding to increase equipment latency and induce physical
illness, planting real-world objects to overwhelm displays, subverting a personal area network to
sow confusion, injecting virtual data to distract personnel, using objects to overwhelm a user
with confusing false alarms, assessing user status through an eye tracker, and other potential
attacks.