HUNTSVILLE – Sentar, teamed with SYColeman, wins a Phase I SBIR with U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command. In response to the need for integrated cyber and physical security, the Sentar team is developing an enterprise security management console called COMBO. COMBO will include development of a Common Event Ontology for cross-domain knowledge representation and definition of a generic interface for information exchange between Sentar’s Work-Centered Interface for Computer Network Defense (WCI-CND) and physical security systems, such as SYColeman’s intelligent surveillance solution, Praetorian. Data streams obtained from video, proximity, motion, and biometric devices will be correlated with cyber-attack information to pinpoint and document the locations and personal identities associated with attacks and other suspicious activities. By bringing together Sentar’s advanced technologies for computer network defense with SYColeman’s intelligent surveillance solutions, COMBO provides a full range of integrated capabilities for security situation awareness.
A technology capable of supporting security across both physical and computer domains will have broad applicability throughout government and industry, and it is particularly appropriate to the distributed architecture of military systems critical to the nation’s infrastructure that are susceptible to global attack and in need of such a capability. For example, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems used to manage electrical power grids, water treatment and distribution, oil refineries, and pipelines are increasingly vulnerable. As all facets of industry and government come to rely on secured information systems, they share a common problem. Protecting their information assets becomes mission-critical, and the threats are pervasive. Thus the applicability of this technology extends to all organizations with a stake in information systems.