Will Roper, assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics at the U.S. Air Force and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said the service plans to publish on open source platforms some of its code to generate more insights from the cybersecurity community, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

He said he also expects the Air Force to reassess how it classifies and develops applications to facilitate collaboration with white hat hackers and accommodate bug bounties.

“If a hacker in a foreign nation is able to take our system down in a few hours of conflict then I would be hard-pressed to say that by classifying our systems we did our warfighters the service that they deserve,” Roper said in a virtual press call Friday. “There is a way to have a hybrid model.”

Under the hybrid model, initial software and designs at the conceptual level could be shared with others to address and reduce vulnerabilities as the systems mature into operational platforms.

An upcoming Government Accountability Office (GAO) report will present more than 100 recommendations on how federal civilian agencies can address risks posed by foreign suppliers to their supply chains of information and communications technologies, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

The report, which is slated for release in September 2020, is based on GAO’s analysis of supply chains of 23 civilian agencies in response to the request of the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

“The vast majority of agencies lack comprehensive processes in order to effectively manage their supply chains,” Carol Harris, director of GAO's information technology and cybersecurity team, told the publication.

Aside from China, Harris said the pending report also cites other countries in Asia and Europe that pose a concern when it comes to the security of supply chains. She said, “It’s really all over the place. So it’s really critical for agencies to have these supply chain risk management practices in place."

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is collaborating with a national laboratory with the Department of Energy (DoE) to come up with a cyber risk framework to help identify the latest cyber threats facing the country’s critical infrastructure, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

Daniel Kroese, acting deputy assistant director of CISA’s National Risk Management Center, said the National Critical Functions Risk Architecture is a big data platform that will help determine some of the “common pathways” of cyber attacks on telecommunications, finance, energy and other sectors.

“The results of your analysis on there, perhaps we could print out, but I couldn’t just press print on the entire NCF Risk Architecture, because it’s really kind of a big-data, multi-vector solution of stitching together different relational data points and nodes of risk factors across the critical infrastructure community. I think it’s pretty distinct, but certainly not competing in terms of being helpful for resilience for connected systems,” he said of the NCF Risk Architecture during a virtual cybersecurity conference Tuesday.

Kroese said the new framework is part of CISA’s efforts to address areas of “concentrated risk.” He also shared his insights on software assurance and CISA’s work on a vulnerability disclosure platform.

The Department of Energy (DoE) has earmarked $8.5 million in funds to support five three-year projects that seek to enable reusability and accessibility of artificial intelligence data and models.

The selected projects will cover the areas of materials science, high-energy physics, microbial science and high-performance computing, DOE said Monday. The awardees will also explore the relationships between AI models and data in an effort to determine potential applications of AI technology.

“One of the major scientific challenges of our time is being able to access and effectively analyze mounting quantities of data,” said Chris Fall, director of DOE's office of Science.

Fall added the awardees will implement Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data principles to their projects. DOE picked the awardees through a competitive peer review process.