DARPA transfers advanced Cyber net testing facility to DoD

A vast new Internet-like test bed that can probe complex defense and commercial critical infrastructure networks' Cyber security-worthiness is now in the hands of the Department of Defense.

On Nov. 13, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said it had officially transferred the National Cyber Range (NCR) it developed to the DoD's Test Resource Management Center.

A fact sheet posted on the White House's Web site, said the NCR "will enable a revolution in national cyber capabilities and accelerate technology transition in support of the President's Comprehensive National Cyber-Security Initiative (CNCI)."

According to DARPA, the NCR can realistically and quickly replicate globally interconnected networks to securely test new Cyber tools and capabilities in a realistic environment. The test bed, which is actually a collection of smaller test beds that can be combined and recombined to provide larger or smaller scale experimental environments, provides the complex interaction found in real-life networks, according to DARPA. The NCR can test component to the system level events, for things like buggy code, misconfigurations, and user actions on the vast complex scale found in the real Internet, said the agency's NCR fact sheet.

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