The Defense Information Systems Agency is establishing a laboratory near its Fort Meade headquarters in Maryland to house a pilot program focusing on testing methods to develop zero-trust network architectures, Nextgov reported Wednesday. 

Jason Martin, acting director of DISA’s cyber directorate, said during a panel at the FCW Cybersecurity Summit that the agency and U.S. Cyber Command will launch and run the pilot program to study approaches for improving access and identity management on military networks. 

The program will establish a framework for monitoring access on various network layers; develop tools to manage access and identity; and deploy the tools across the Department of Defense. 

“[The efforts] will inform what we actually do need to build out, integrate and configure,” Martin told reporters. “It’s rethinking how we do continuous security.”

Michael Griffin, undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense and 2019 Wash100 Award winner, has urged the U.S. government to augment collaborative efforts with academic and industry partners. Griffin said the three sectors should drive partnerships to allow rapid development, conception and procurement of technologies, Naval Sea Systems Command said Wednesday. 

He cited various projects that utilized rapid approaches including the development of the Lockheed Martin-built SR-71 Blackbird and F-117 Nighthawk aircraft systems. 

“The ability of the U.S. to innovate is what ended World War II and the Cold War,”  said Griffin. “That was fostered by a unique collaboration between university and academic research applied to problems of the day, government to waive the baton and industry to manufacture with pace.”

Branko Bokan, an official under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s cybersecurity division, said the agency is deploying a new approach that uses an adversary viewpoint to address network security issues, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

Bokan noted during an event in Washington, D.C. that the Cybersecurity Architecture Review of the .gov domain, also known as “.govCAR”, was based on a Department of Defense approach and enables the Department of Homeland Security component to identify bad actors’ cyber capabilities by enacting threat-based activities.

“With this methodology, we can put ourselves in the shoes or in the position of an adversary to look at our cyber capabilities,” he said.  “And the first thing we do is enumerate all the threats—all the actual threats that we see in the wild today.”

Bokan’s comments come ahead of CISA’s planned release of a white paper on cybersecurity best practices. According to the report, agencies must implement and integrate mobile threat defense, mobile application vetting and enterprise mobility management to improve their security posture.

Air Force Space Command presented a new enterprise data strategy that organizes and integrates activities across multiple data sources. AFSPC unveiled the new strategy at the command’s Chief Data Office Innovation Summit that took place July 30 to 31 at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, Patrick AFB said Tuesday.

The summit served as a venue for discussion on strategy’s construction, rationale and potential benefits to the warfighter. The strategy serves as a framework for an integrated, agile data enterprise designed to support space domain awareness and multi-domain missions.

“The strategy will act as a clear roadmap outlining how AFSPC will structure and manage data,” said Maj. Gen. Kimberly Crider, mobilization assistant to the AFSPC commander, who co-hosted the summit.

Mark Brady, AFSPC chief data officer and the event’s other co-host, said his team conducted an assessment to determine the needs across the command’s space operations. The assessment covered 19 sites and found the command lacks an enterprise-level architecture that ties all data together. The strategy aims to address this finding.