A -- TRUST RFI Announcement

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) often selects its research efforts through the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) process. This request for information (RFI) is intended to provide details about a possible future DARPA program so that industry feedback can be considered prior to the issuance of a BAA. Responders are invited to provide comment on any or all of the content of this announcement to include suggestions for improving the scope of a possible solicitation in order to ensure that every effort is made to address this important problem. Responses to this request may or may not be incorporated within any future BAA announcement. In order to comply with scheduling priorities, responders are asked to provide feedback with 10 calendar days to jonathan.breedlove.ctr@darpa.mil. The attachment to this announcement contains details of the scope of technical efforts. In the future, DARPA may solicit innovative research proposals to advance the science and technology for ensuring that integrated circuits can be trusted regardless of their origin and fabrication process. Research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice. Background and Scope Largely because of global economic pressures, fabrication of advanced integrated circuits is migrating to foreign foundries. In addition, business models are increasingly driven by commercial, rather then military, demand. Dedicated facilities cannot provide the performance, variety and volume of microchips that the DOD needs. These trends have raised concern regarding US weapons systems reliance on high performance microchips and potential vulnerabilities to these systems caused by malicious manipulation of hardware and software processes that might render these vital systems inoperable at some future time. This situation is true for both ASIC and COTS parts. Furthermore, there are issues with protecting intellectual property and military secrets as they are often embedded in the design of microcircuits, and the details of this design are often needed by the manufacturer in the fabrication process. Finally, there are also issues associated with protecting intellectual property and military secrets after the systems are deployed, especially in circumstances where systems and components are lost, captured or are no longer under US control and subject to reverse engineering over a sustained period of time. This new DARPA initiative is being considered to address the above issues and others that have been identified in the DSB study on High Performance Microchip Supply [http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2005-02-HPMS_Report_Final.pdf]. The report addresses design, the use of advanced design tools, fabrication, packaging, testing, and monitoring of high performance IC's within critical systems and subsystems. Specific areas of interest to DARPA include TRUST, Information Leakage and Anti-Tamper; although the primary interest is TRUST. DARPA will also engage in a Metrics-for-TRUST task focused on measuring the value of DARPA investments in novel technologies. To be clear, DARPA is only interested in issues related to TRUSTed Integrated Circuits and is not interested in proposals pertaining to issues concerning printed circuit boards or the general area of malicious software. Interested organizations are encouraged to obtain the attachment to this announcement and provide a response, within 10 calendar days to jonathan.breedlove.ctr@darpa.mil, with suggested technical scope modification and/or additions. This request is being made so that DARPA, if it decides to go forward with a BAA, can have the benefit of this industry feedback to better assure that responses are focused on the most critical technologies to address important problems. THIS IS NOT A SOLICITATION FOR PROPOSALS