Two years ago, the White House and the Pentagon launched a massive, secretive $17 billion effort to shore up the nation's defenses, and assigned Darpa a crucial role: build a replica Internet – a "National Cyber Range" – that could not only be used to test out information attacks, but could "emulate human behavior on all nodes," as well.

The project, personally guided by then-director Tony Tether, was supposed to be one of the most important in Darpa's history, on par with the agency's missions at the dawn of the space race. "Congress has given Darpa a direct order; that’s only happened once before — with the Sputnik program in the ’50s," one defense official told Danger Room. The New York Times went even further, breathlessly proclaiming that "the Cyber Range is to the digital age what the Bikini Atoll — the islands the Army vaporized in the 1950s to measure the power of the hydrogen bomb — was to the nuclear age."

But now, some in the armed services are grumbling that Darpa isn't working quickly enough on this all-important, $130 million mission. A few agencies are even looking to build their own ranges, Aviation Week reports.

"The services didn’t want to wait around for Darpa,” a senior official tells the magazine. “Everybody wanted a range, but Darpa’s program was a 6-to-7-year effort to put a national cyber range in place. That’s why support eroded. Everybody wanted it quicker.” The Navy, the National Security Agency, and the Air Force are all pursuing ersatz Internet programs, according to AvWeek.

I've pinged Darpa for a response. But I'm guessing that program manager Michael Van Putte would argue that his program is a lot more far-reaching than giving government hackers a new network playground. Today's ranges take months to set up a single test, with each machine manually configured. Van Putte wants to conduct multiple tests at once, and then rejigger the network topology with a few mouse clicks. Plus, he wants all those emulated people running around on the network. “You will have automated ‘bots’ that are trying to get work done while you’re trying to test the security. So you’ll be able to quantitatively measure their effectiveness at work and at the same time, your effectiveness at keeping the bad guys out of your network,” VanPutte tells *Signal *magazine.

"Over the ages, scientific progress has been held back by the ability to make measurements at the level of the environment for which the scientific research was being done: Telescopes, microscopes, particle accelerators, etc.," he noted in a recent presentation. "The National Cyber Range is the measurement capability for cyber research in both classified and unclassified environments. Without it, research will be done in darkness and only stumble accidentally into the light."

That is, if it ever gets finished.

Photo: DoD

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