The next six to nine months will prove critical for a project in the works for six years at Mississippi State University’s Center for Cyber Innovation.
The computer program Netmapper, designed by CCI researchers Phil Akers and Bob Reese, scans computer networks to identify all of its devices, installed programs and services and makes a map of them on a screen. Akers and Reese have been customizing Netmapper to scan the complex networks of the U.S. military so that government entities can use it to simulate cyberattacks and test out their defenses.
Circadence Corporation, a cyber readiness company that has an office in Tupelo, contracted Netmapper for the project in 2014. Reese said he believes the program will get official permission in the next six months to be used on any military base nationwide.
Reese and CCI Director Drew Hamilton both said it’s unusual for a piece of university-created software to be considered for use by the U.S. Department of Defense.
“Trying to determine what’s on a network and to do network planning is a huge problem, so I think this is a major contribution that we’re looking at making from MSU,” Hamilton said.
In 2018, Reese and Akers took over responsibility for the creation of automation tools that can replicate a network and simulate cyberattacks because “other groups could never deliver something that was working,” Reese said.
Netmapper creates a visual display of how every device in a network is linked, what kinds of devices and programs are in the network and how the links between them have changed over time. It also duplicates the settings from a real computer network into a simulated environment so programmers do not have to build one from scratch, Reese said.
The Army’s Threat Systems Management Office works with Circadence to create simulated computer networks and has been funding the collaboration between Circadence and MSU for seven years. Mississippi’s congressional delegation directed the first year of funding to TSMO specifically for academic and economic development in Mississippi, Reese said, and the project has performed well enough for the funding to be renewed every year.
TSMO is a cyber range, or “a collection of people and computers that are used to simulate computer networks,” Reese said. If other cyber ranges adopt Netmapper as a defense tool, the developers will receive funding from sources outside Congress, he said.
Circadence would like to develop Netmapper as a commercial tool, but the research team is focusing on “trying to make government users happy” right now, Reese said.
Akers described the project as “fascinating” to work on, especially since he and Reese are primarily electrical engineers and had not considered computer networks to be an area of focus for them when they started working on it.
“We’ve both learned a huge amount in the course of this project, and we’ve both enjoyed doing it,” Akers said. “It’s been a lot of fun and I hope it will continue to be fascinating for some time.”
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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