Cyber Command and Control (C2) Technologies

The purpose of this modification is to republish the original announcement, incorporating all previous modifications, pursuant to FAR 35.016(c). This republishing also includes the following changes: (a) Dates: Inserted end date of BAA; (b) Section I, Funding Opportunity Description: Added FY12 Focus Areas; (c) Section III.3 and III.4, Eligibility Information: Added more detailed eligibility information; and (d) Section VI.3, Reporting: Added more detailed Jiffy/TFIMS reporting information. No other changes have been made. NAICS CODE: 541712 FEDERAL AGENCY NAME: Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command, AFRL - Rome Research Site, AFRL/Information Directorate, 26 Electronic Parkway, Rome, NY, 13441-4514 TITLE: Cyber Command and Control (C2) Technologies ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 08-09-RIKA CFDA Number: 12.800 DATES: White papers will be accepted at any time until 2:00 p.m. Eastern time on 28 Sep 2012, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 09 should be submitted by 1 Feb 09; FY 10 by 1 Feb 10; FY 11 by 1 Feb 11 and; FY 12 by 1 Feb 12. The closing date for this BAA will be 28 Sep 2012. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. See Section IV of this announcement for further details. I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION: The Air Force Research Laboratory, in partnership with the Global Cyber Integration Center (GCIC) is soliciting white papers for various scientific studies, projects, and experiments focused on developing capabilities to provide the Air Force the means to conduct Global C2, including C2 of cyber assets. GCIC is a Field Operating Agency (FOA) reporting to the Secretary of the Air Force, Chief of Warfighting Integration and Chief Information Officer SAF/XC. GCIC is chartered to conduct innovation, integration, and standardization of current and future command and control systems and sub-systems across air, space AND cyberspace to enable decision superiority. For the purpose of this BAA, AFRL and GCIC will partner to address emerging cyber concepts, technologies, and experimentation to further enhance global and cyber C2 for the warfighter. Cyber operations can be conducted at any level of war and across the entire spectrum of conflict in support of global and theater objectives. Global C2 provides a persistent, 24/7, collaborative environment comprised of people, systems, and tools to enable timely response to today's asymmetric challenges. Global C2 ties real-time intelligence, collaborative planning, and decision making to support a broad mix of military options - offensive, defensive, kinetic and non-kinetic. Global C2 and cyber C2 capabilities need to be designed, developed, and implemented that provide for the ability to monitor, assess, plan, and execute cyber operations. This BAA focuses on developing cyber concepts, technologies, and an experimentation framework to improve Air Force cyber C2 capabilities and integration of these capabilities with other Air Force and Joint systems. To frame the intent of this BAA, we need to briefly discuss cyberspace. The National Military Strategy for Cyberspace Operations says, "Cyberspace is a domain characterized by the use of electronics and the electromagnetic spectrum to store, modify, and exchange data via networked systems and associated physical infrastructures." For the purpose of this BAA, AFRL will focus on technologies to enable C2 of global and cyberspace assets and integrating their effects with kinetic operations. Specific technologies should deliver capabilities that include, but are not limited to Cyber C2 collaboration, interoperability, cross/multi domain, visualization and integration of friendly orders of battle, course of action development, experimentation, Integrated Task Order production, effects deconfliction, hybrid/joint effects, and assessment. We assert that simply porting technologies developed for C2 in the air and space domain may or may not be directly applicable or useful in the cyber domain. Furthermore, we acknowledge that C2 of non-kinetic assets and the effects they produce and integrating them with kinetic assets/effects across the global spectrum is at a formative stage. With these two concepts in mind, we seek novel and unique approaches to enable Global C2 in an environment that is not confined by time or distance and an area of responsibility that is not constrained by geographical boundaries. FY09 Focus Area - Integrated Tasking Order research This FY09 focus area seeks novel research and development efforts that advance the state of the art in integrated battle planning to radically improve our ability to coordinate and synchronize air, cyber and space forces to achieve desired effects. Future decision-makers must ensure unity of effort across physical and virtual domains, as current static and deliberate planning struggles to keep up with fluid, highly volatile world states. Plans need to be built quickly, continuously assessed for validity, viability and feasibility, and dynamically updated according to the evolving world state. Plans also need to scale at the strategic level for kinetic and non-kinetic assets; provide enough structure to adequately synchronize, coordinate and deconflict assets at the operational level; and capture adequate fine-grained detail to conduct operations at the tactical level across multiple levels of security. The Government is looking for technical solutions that provide the ability to represent plans that fully capture and describe air, cyber, and space activities (e.g., one plan representation for all or a collection of highly related representations); the ability to dynamically model and relate air, cyber, and space activities and the ability to automatically manage both plans and models at the pace of modern combat, within a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) (e.g., a plan management service). Being able to plan among distributed enclaves is a desired attribute (e.g., a possible design constraint), but demonstration of such capability is left to other efforts. Submissions may propose tackling just one, several, or all of these abilities. Resulting capabilities must fit within the evolving net-centric, service oriented USAF C2 enterprise. Therefore, efforts must be compatible with the Net-Centric Enterprise Solutions for Interoperability (NESI), the Net-Enabled Command Capability (NECC) and the concepts detailed in USAF Electronic Systems Center's Technical Implementation Architecture (TIA) while also demonstrating independence from specific products, web applications, and database servers. Resulting services are envisioned as being transitioned as a Capability Module (CM) in accordance with NECC guidelines. Information on these standards and guidelines can be found at the following web-sites: NESI Public Website (http://nesipublic.spawar.navy.mil/), DISA NECC Website (http://www.disa.mil/necc/), and USAF ESC TIA Website (http://www.herbb.hanscom.af.mil/tia/TIA_TRD-V1-for_HERBB.doc). Offerors may submit compelling arguments as to why their solution should not abide by these standards and guidelines. Focus areas should include a series of Limited Technology Experiments (LTEs) to demonstrate and validate prototypes that resulting capabilities may enable. AFRL will evaluate delivered prototypes in our Command & Control Concept Center. To reduce risk, AFRL is currently running the Office of Naval Research (ONR) SOA Reference Implementation (SOA RI). Consequently, delivered prototypes must work in that environment, although other SOA implementations may be considered, particularly ones that may have more advanced security infrastructures. Because it is expected that several efforts will be awarded to work on specific parts of the challenge, offerors must agree to establish associate agreements with pertinent team members. All responses, unclassified/classified, to this FY09 Focus Area - Integrated Tasking Order Research must be sent U.S. Postal Service, registered mail and addressed to AFRL/RISF, Attn: Elizabeth Kean, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505, and reference BAA 08-09-RIKA. Electronic submission is NOT authorized. Questions can be directed to the cognizant technical POC, Elizabeth Kean at elizabeth.kean@rl.af.mil or (315)330-260; or Robert Farrell at robert.farrell@rl.af.mil or (315) 330-3050. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: White papers for this focus area only will be accepted at any time until 2pm Eastern time on 28 Sep 2012. However, due to funding availability, it is recommended that white papers be received for this focus area only by 15 Jul 09. FY11 Focus Area - Cyber Asset Assignment This FY11 focus area seeks novel research and development efforts that advance the state of the art in cyber asset assignment to improve the United States Air Force (USAF) ability to employ assets to achieve desired effects. It is imperative that decision makers have the capability to quantify and/or estimate the effectiveness of cyber assets and use it as a foundation for trade-off analyses. They will also require techniques and methods for optimizing assignment to maximize the likelihood of achieving desired effects, while minimizing undesired outcomes. The USAF needs to execute cyber C2 processes akin to the well understood kinetic processes to integrate across domains and services to support integrated operations. Prior work has been done in the area of cyber asset characterization, attribute identification, ontology development, and simulation. The Government is looking for technical solutions that focus on the analytical and empirical analysis of this foundational work with the objective of quantifying the effectiveness of various cyber assets to develop state of the art assignment techniques and validating the results in small-scale modeling and simulation environments. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses, unclassified/classified, to this FY11 Focus Area - Cyber Asset Assignment must be sent U.S. Postal Service, registered mail and addressed to AFRL/RISF, Attn: Stephen Colenzo, 25 Electronic Parkway, Rome NY 13441-4505, and reference BAA 08-09-RIKA. Electronic submission is NOT authorized. Questions can be directed to the cognizant technical POC, Stephen Colenzo at Stephen.colenzo@rl.af.mil or (315)330-7665; or Terrance Stedman at terrance.stedman@rl.af.mil or (315) 330-2136. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: White papers for this focus area only will be accepted at any time until 2pm Eastern time on 28 Sep 2012. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. FY12 Focus Area - Command and Control of Cyber Assets for Mission Assurance Bidders should be conscious of our increasing focus on the use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to maximize interoperability and reusability of AFRL-developed technologies. Offers should demonstrate an understanding of service development and, to the extent reasonable and possible, propose deliverables that are readily deployed as services (i.e., discoverable, well-defined, self-contained modules that are independent of state or context of other services). Where SOA is a viable part of an offeror's technical approach, offeror should be prepared to discuss SOA infrastructure requirements at program kickoff and updates to decomposition and implementation status discussed at technical program reviews. Potential SOA deliverables might include Web Service Description Language (WSDL) service definitions, documented service behaviors (dependencies, sequence diagrams, stateful assumptions), and configurable virtual machine service deployments. This FY12 focus area seeks novel research and development efforts that will result in prototype capabilities that help AF cyber Command and Control (C2) operators proactively build and shape the portion of cyberspace employed in support of Mission Assurance (MA) objectives. The prototypes developed under this effort will be planning services that can be integrated directly into a services based infrastructure. These services will incorporate the capability to optimize cyber defensive postures that protect critical mission threads and the associated cyber resources to the maximum extent possible before packets fly, and develop resilient courses of action (manual and automated) to survive and recover when defenses are breached. Taken together, the planning services will implement a defense-in-breadth strategy that considers a large range of assets available on the Air Force network, the overall priority of supported missions across at least two "theaters," and the cyber capabilities at each of the nodes participating in or directly supporting mission objectives. The Government is anticipating, but not mandating, technical solutions in three main components for this effort. The first component is the core resource allocation algorithm that will proactively generate optimized cyber defensive postures to support initial planning and can also later be dynamically reconfigured during execution to thwart and/or recover from cyber attacks. The focus of this component will be to develop defensive plans that avoid most attacks utilizing cyber defensive posture optimization but that could also be reconfigured to survive and recover when defenses break down during execution. The second component is the capture of mission essential functions and mapping of these functions to cyber systems supporting specifics missions. With these mappings, this component will be aligned to develop a capability to provide defensive cyber courses of action options and optimization techniques. This component could be structured in a manner that allows construction of interfaces to defensive component technologies that would support automated task flows and reconfiguration commands. The third component is the development of a service-based cyber defensive planner that ties the above components together to provide a user interface, data services, and Cyberspace Control Order (CCO) generation capability for tasking subordinate units. The mapping effort results will be applied to mature today's semi-structured text CCO into a formal grammar. Needed attributes for the production of the CCO will be defined to enable the required structure for planning while designing flexibility for potential future modification and the evolving CCO processes. The integration of the three components is expected to be encompassed in the planner component. All responses, unclassified/classified, to this FY12 Focus Area - Command and Control of Cyber Assets for Mission Assurance must be sent U.S. Postal Service, registered mail and addressed to AFRL/RISF, Attn: Wyatt Bora, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505, and reference BAA 08-09-RIKA. Electronic submission is NOT authorized. Questions can be directed to the cognizant technical POC, Wyatt Bora at wyatt.bora@rl.af.mil or (315) 330-4944; or Chad DeStefano at chad.destefano@rl.af.mil or (315) 330-4286. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: White papers for this focus area only will be accepted at any time until 2pm Eastern time on 28 Sep 2012. However, due to funding availability, it is highly recommended that white papers be received for this focus area only by 22 Jul 11. II. AWARD INFORMATION: Total funding for this BAA is approximately $20M. The anticipated funding to be obligated under this BAA is broken out by fiscal year as follows: FY 09 - $5M; FY 10 - $5M; FY 11 - $5M; and FY12 - $5M. Individual awards will not normally exceed 18 months with dollar amounts normally ranging between $300,000 to $1,500,000 per year. There is also the potential to make awards up to any dollar value. Awards of efforts as a result of this announcement will be in the form of contracts, grants, cooperative agreements or other transactions depending upon the nature of the work proposed. III. ELIGIBILITY INFORMATION: 1. ELIGIBLE APPLICANTS: All potential applicants are eligible. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors are advised that their participation is subject to foreign disclosure review procedures. Foreign or foreign-owned offerors should immediately contact the contracting office focal point, Lynn G. White, Contracting Officer, telephone (315) 330-4996 or e-mail Lynn.White@rl.af.mil for information if they contemplate responding. The e-mail must reference the title and BAA 08-09-RIKA. 2. COST SHARING OR MATCHING: Cost sharing is not a requirement. 3. CCR Registration: Unless exempted by 2 CFR 25.110 all offerors must: (a) Be registered in the Central Contractor Registration (CCR) prior to submitting an application or proposal; (b) Maintain an active CCR registration with current information at all times during which it has an active Federal award or an application or proposal under consideration by an agency; and (c) Provide its DUNS number in each application or proposal it submits to the agency. 4. Executive Compensation and First-Tier Sub-contract/Sub-recipient Awards: Any contract award resulting from this announcement may contain the clause at FAR 52.204-10 - Reporting Executive Compensation and First-Tier Subcontract Awards. Any grant or agreement award resulting from this announcement may contain the award term set forth in 2 CFR, Appendix A to Part 25 http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx? c=ecfr&sid=c55a4687d6faa13b137a26d0eb436edb&rgn=div5&view= text&node=2:1.1.1.41&idno=2#2:1.1.1.4.1.2.1.1 IV. APPLICATION AND SUBMISSION INFORMATION: 1. APPLICATION PACKAGE: THIS ANNOUNCEMENT CONSTITUTES THE ONLY SOLICITATION. WE ARE SOLICITING WHITE PAPERS ONLY. DO NOT SUBMIT A FORMAL PROPOSAL AT THIS TIME. Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal, see Section VI of this announcement for further details. For additional information, a copy of the AFRL/Rome Research Sites "Broad Agency Announcement (BAA): A Guide for Industry," April 2007, may be accessed at: http://www.fbo.gov/spg/USAF/AFMC/AFRLRRS/Reference%2DNumber%2DBAAGUIDE/listing.html 2. CONTENT AND FORM OF SUBMISSION: Offerors are required to submit a 3 to 7 page white paper summarizing their proposed approach/solution. The purpose of the white paper is to preclude unwarranted effort on the part of an offeror whose proposed work is not of interest to the Government. The white paper will be formatted as follows: Section A: Title, Period of Performance, Estimated Cost, Name/Address of Company, Technical and Contracting Points of Contact (phone, fax and email)(this section is NOT included in the page count); Section B: Task Objective; Section C: Technical Summary and Proposed Deliverables. Multiple white papers within the purview of this announcement may be submitted by each offeror. If the offeror wishes to restrict its white papers/proposals, they must be marked with the restrictive language stated in FAR 15.609(a) and (b). All white papers/proposals shall be double spaced with a font no smaller than 12 pitch. In addition, respondents are requested to provide their Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) number, their Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number, a fax number, an e-mail address, and reference BAA 08-09-RIKA with their submission. All responses to this announcement must be addressed to the technical POC, as discussed in paragraph seven of this section. 3. SUBMISSION DATES AND TIMES: White papers will be accepted until 2pm Eastern time on 28 Sep 2012, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. It is recommended that white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 09 by 1 Feb 09; FY 10 by 1 Feb 10; FY 11 by 1 Feb 11 and; FY 12 by 1 Feb 12. The closing date of this BAA will be 28 Sep 2012. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. 4. FUNDING RESTRICTIONS: The cost of preparing white papers/proposals in response to this announcement is not considered an allowable direct charge to any resulting contract or any other contract, but may be an allowable expense to the normal bid and proposal indirect cost specified in FAR 31.205-18. Incurring pre-award costs for ASSISTANCE INSTRUMENTS ONLY, are regulated by the DoD Grant and Agreements Regulations (DODGARS). 5. CLASSIFICATION GUIDANCE FOR WHITEPAPER SUBMISSIONS: AFRL/RISF will accept classified responses to this BAA when the classification is mandated by classification guidance provided by an Original Classification Authority of the U.S. Government, or when the proposer believes the work, if successful, would merit classification. Security classification guidance in the form of a DD Form 254 (DoD Contract Security Classification Specification) will not be provided at this time since AFRL is soliciting ideas only. Proposers that intend to include classified information or data in their white paper submission or who are unsure about the appropriate classification of their white papers should contact the technical point of contact listed in Section VII for guidance and direction in advance of preparation. 6. All Proposers should review the NATIONAL INDUSTRIAL SECURITY PROGRAM OPERATING MANUAL, (NISPOM), dated February 28, 2006 as it provides baseline standards for the protection of classified information and prescribes the requirements concerning Contractor Developed Information under paragraph 4-105. Defense Security Service (DSS) Site for the NISPOM is: https://www.dss.mil/portal/ShowBinary/BEA%20Repository/new_dss_internet//isp/fac_clear/download_nispom.html. 7. OTHER SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS: DO NOT send white papers to the Contracting Officer. All responses, unclassified/classified, to this announcement must be sent U.S. Postal Service, registered mail and addressed to AFRL/RISF, 525 Brooks Road, Rome NY 13441-4505, and reference BAA 08-09-RIKA. Electronic submission is NOT authorized. Questions can be directed to the cognizant technical POC, Richard Fedors at richard.fedors@rl.af.mil or (315) 330-3608. V. APPLICATION REVIEW INFORMATION: 1. CRITERIA: The following criteria will be used to determine whether white papers and proposals submitted are consistent with the intent of this BAA and of interest to the Government. Criteria 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 are equally important and of greater importance than 1.4. 1.1. Overall scientific and/or technical merit, including technical feasibility, degree of innovation, understanding of the technical and operational approaches; 1.2. The effort's potential contribution for providing C2 capabilities that meet Air Force cyber requirements within a realistic and reasonable schedule; 1.3. The prospect for effective transfer of produced technologies into Air Force and joint C2 systems; and 1.4. The reasonableness and realism of proposed costs and fees (if any). No further evaluation criteria will be used in selecting white papers/proposals. Individual white paper/proposal evaluations will be evaluated against the evaluation criteria without regard to other white papers and proposals submitted under this BAA. White papers and proposals submitted will be evaluated as they are received. 2. REVIEW AND SELECTION PROCESS: Only Government employees will evaluate the white papers/proposals for selection. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate has contracted for various business and staff support services, some of which require contractors to obtain administrative access to proprietary information submitted by other contractors. Administrative access is defined as "handling or having physical control over information for the sole purpose of accomplishing the administrative functions specified in the administrative support contract, which do not require the review, reading, or comprehension of the content of the information on the part of non-technical professionals assigned to accomplish the specified administrative tasks." These contractors have signed general non-disclosure agreements and organizational conflict of interest statements. The required administrative access will be granted to non-technical professionals. Examples of the administrative tasks performed include: a.) assembling and organizing information for R&D case files; b.) accessing library files for use by government personnel; and c.) handling and administration of proposals, contracts, contract funding and queries. Any objection to administrative access must be in writing to the Contracting Officer and shall include a detailed statement of the basis for the objection. VI. AWARD ADMINISTRATION INFORMATION: 1. AWARD NOTICES: Those white papers found to be consistent with the intent of this BAA may be invited to submit a technical and cost proposal. Notification by email or letter will be sent by the technical POC. Such invitation does not assure that the submitting organization will be awarded a contract. Those white papers not selected to submit a proposal will be notified in the same manner. Prospective offerors are advised that only Contracting Officers are legally authorized to commit the Government. All offerors submitting white papers will be contacted by the technical POC, referenced in Section VII of this announcement. Offerors can email the technical POC for status of their white paper/proposal no earlier than 45 days after proposal submission. 2. ADMINISTRATIVE AND NATIONAL POLICY REQUIREMENTS: CLASSIFIED SUBMISSIONS: AFRL/RISF will accept classified responses to this BAA when the classification is mandated by classification guidance provided by an Original Classification Authority of the U.S. Government, or when the proposer believes the work, if successful, would merit classification. Security classification guidance in the form of a DD Form 254 (DoD Contract Security Classification Specification) will not be provided at this time since AFRL is soliciting ideas only. After reviewing incoming proposals, if a determination is made that contract award may result in access to classified information, a DD Form 254 will be issued upon contract award. Proposers that intend to include classified information or data in their submission or who are unsure about the appropriate classification of their white papers should contact the technical point of contact listed in Section VII for guidance and direction in advance of preparation. Depending on the work to be performed, the offeror may require a SECRET, TOP SECRET, or TS/SCI facility clearance and safeguarding capability; therefore, personnel identified for assignment to a classified effort must be cleared for access to classified information at the time of award. In addition, the offeror may be required to have, or have access to, a certified and Government-approved facility to support work under this BAA. Data subject to export control constraints may be involved and only firms holding certification under the US/Canada Joint Certification Program (JCP) (www.dlis.dla.mil/jcp) are allowed access to such data. 3. REPORTING: Once a proposal has been selected for award, offerors will be required to submit their reporting requirement through one of our web-based, reporting systems known as JIFFY or TFIMS. Prior to award, the offeror will be notified which reporting system they are to use, and will be given complete instructions regarding its use. Please note that use of the JIFFY or TFIMS application requires customers outside of the .mil domain to purchase an approved External Certificate Authority certificate to facilitate a secured log on process. It is necessary to obtain an ECA certificate BEFORE obtaining a JIFFY or TFIMS user account. Additional information on obtaining an ECA is available at: http://iase.disa.mil/pki/eca/index.html . VII. AGENCY CONTACTS: Questions of a technical nature shall be directed to the cognizant technical point of contact, as specified below: Richard Fedors Telephone: (315) 330-3608 Email: richard.fedors@rl.af.mil Questions of a contractual/business nature shall be directed to the cognizant contracting officer, as specified below: Lynn White Telephone (315) 330-4996 Email: lynn.white@rl.af.mil The email must reference the solicitation (BAA) number and title of the acquisition. In accordance with AFFARS 5301.91, an Ombudsman has been appointed to hear and facilitate the resolution of concerns from offerors, potential offerors, and others for this acquisition announcement. Before consulting with an ombudsman, interested parties must first address their concerns, issues, disagreements, and/or recommendations to the contracting officer for resolution. AFFARS Clause 5352.201-9101 Ombudsman (April 2010) will be incorporated into all contracts awarded under this BAA. The AFRL Ombudsman is as follows: Susan Hunter Building 15, Room 225 1864 Fourth Street Wright-Patterson AFB OH 45433-7130 FAX: (937) 225-5036; Comm: (937) 904-4407 All responsible organizations may submit a white paper which shall be considered.