The Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) has launched the second phase of the Predictive Cyber Analytics competition to develop a deployable solution to predict and counter future cyber threats.
It will provide funding for novel approaches in a proactive form of cyber security in a hostile cyber environment. Ultimately these could predict the most likely offensive cyber events and identify the best possible defences.
This would provide an alternative to conventional approaches that have relied on black/white lists, known virus/malware signatures, and more recently on broader machine learning anomaly detection methods.
The competition document highlights a number of possibilities, including predicting the goals of a future or ongoing attack, identifying what an adversary might do if their primary intention is blocked, and gamifying a system and mission to identify a range of attack methods and successful defences.
Prizes
DASA said it has £850,000 available for this phase and expects to fund up to three projects running over 12 months. This contrasts with the £1 million for seven projects in the first phase, the competition for which began in September of last year.
Further funding is expected for a future phase.
It also emphasised that proposals that focus on theoretical models, lack implementation to real data or ingest social media feeds or other public data of a personal nature are outside of the competition’s scope.
The competition is open for entries until midday on 12 August.
Image from GOV.UK, Open Government Licence v3.0
