The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a new report on forensic science challenges faced by law enforcement officers, auditors and other professionals in cloud environments, Nextgov reported Thursday.

The report enumerated 62 cloud-related forensic challenges and one of those listed challenges is associated with data custodians at cloud service providers who have limited knowledge of records and logs.

“If cloud providers were to keep better records that might be sought after as evidence and had more knowledgeable custodians, they might be on the hook for finding and processing the extra records that are found,” Martin Herman, senior adviser for forensics and information technology at NIST and an author of the report, told the publication.

“This would require that the provider use more resources, not only in personnel but also for computational activities such as correlating potential evidence," he added.

NIST also classified such challenges into nine categories: architecture, data collection, analysis, anti-forensics, incident first responders, role management, legal, standards and training.

Some of the data collection-related challenges in cloud forensics are locating forensic artifacts in distributed, large and dynamic systems and locating and gathering volatile data.

“The long-term goal of this effort is to gain a deeper understanding of those concerns (challenges) and to identify technologies and standards that can mitigate them,” the report’s abstract reads.

The National Background Investigative System Directorate (NBIS) within the Department of Defense (DoD) has established integrated environments on Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud and installed DevSecOps tools to facilitate collaboration among developers, security teams, testers and engineers as part of its DevSecOps implementation effort.

NBIS’ program management office also demonstrated Agile software delivery processes for its Position Designator Tool code through its first tabletop exercise for its DevSecOps pipeline in January, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) said Thursday.

The directorate also plans to subject its investigative management tools and electronic applications to a tabletop exercise.

“The DevSecOps premise is that everyone in the software development life cycle is responsible for security, and we are thrilled to bring this best practice into DoD’s realm,” said Heidi Cotter, NBIS program manager. “Our team has worked diligently over the past year to setup, test and document processes that have laid the foundation of DevSecOps implementation for this program and others at DISA and DoD.”

NBIS secured from DISA’s risk management executive an interim testing authorization during the DevSecOps testing phase and is now seeking full authorization to operate the program this month.

Mark Munsell, chief technology officer at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), said NGA’s two documents on technology focus areas and tech strategy will help the agency address “enduring” analytical and tech challenges, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

“We are looking for industry to take a look at those and propose ideas and technologies that might address those enduring needs,” Munsell said on the network’s Ask the CIO. “We have the technology strategy that focuses on the processes and how we’d like to change. While the tech focus areas focus on the actual what we are looking for, the technology strategy focuses on how we’d like to act, how we’d like to behave and the processes we’d like to change.”

In April, NGA released a document listing data management, advanced analytics and modeling, modern software engineering, artificial intelligence and future of work as its five technology focus areas this year. Munsell said the tech strategy provides information on how NGA wants companies to collaborate with the agency.

“A company may have product that meets the technological need of NGA, but the way they do business, the way they bring that product in and the way NGA adopts it, is really critical,” he said. “We want them to use the cloud. We want them to use DevSecOps. And we want to use product management as a way to manage that instead of the traditional program management.”

The U.S. Space Force concluded the third increment of a first article test (FAT) for an anti-jamming technology designed for the service branch's Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) system. 

The Mitigation and Anti-Jam Enhancement capability underwent adaptive nulling and detection tests and cleared 165 requirements during the FAT. , the U.S. Air Force said Wednesday.

The adaptive nulling test validated MAJE's capacity to suppress interference while the detection test gauged its ability to trace simulated interferers. The team performed the tests virtually for 10 days in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

MAJE is slated to undergo FAT-4 in the fall to test the technology's geolocation feature. USSF will then perform multi-capability and end-to-end trials for the platform as part of FAT-5.

The WGS system is designed to deliver high data rate and long-haul communications capabilities to warfighters, the U.S. State Department, the White House and international partners.