Email was initially created without security in mind and we’ve paid for it ever since by continually bolting fixes onto it, said Isaac Potoczny-Jones, research lead at Galois. But the complexity of connected vehicle systems has created pushback on the issue of cybersecurity, he noted. “Innovative areas like this have a real challenge in baking nonfunctional requirements like cybersecurity into the basis of their systems,” Potoczny-Jones said. “But just because there’s no value today in attackers targeting these systems that there won’t be value tomorrow. We don’t know what we’re up against tomorrow. Things change. They will start to target these systems.”

Specifically, Galois will develop its Prattle system for the Air Force. Galois describes Prattle as a system that generates traffic that misleads an attacker that has penetrated a network: making them doubt what they have learned, or to cause them to make mistakes that increase their likelihood of being detected sooner.

The Air Force is giving Galois a $750,000 grant to work on the program as part of a larger $100 million effort to expand cyber detection technologies. The funds will be used to take the program out of its prototype phase. “The idea is to try to fool the adversary about what’s going on in the world, so that they either make bad decisions they take longer or they are easier to detect,” said Adam Wick, research lead at Galois, the company contracted with the Air Force for the project.

Paving the way for government use, DARPA has funded a handful of startups, such as Guardtime Federal and Galois Inc., to develop blockchain uses for secure communications, as well as potentially everything from weapons systems to files. The work should be completed within a year, Booher said. Some defense contractors are already demonstrating and deploying the blockchain, he said.

If the verification goes well, it would inch DARPA closer to using some form of blockchain technology for the military, Booher says. “We’re certainly thinking through a lot of applications,” he says. “As Galois does its verification work and we understand at a deep level the security properties pf this [technology] then I would start to set up a series of meetings [with the rest of the agency] to start that dialog.”