President Donald Trump postponed plans to sign Tuesday an executive order that would seek to build up the country’s defensive and offensive cyber capabilities and commission a government-wide assessment of cyber risks, The Hill reported Tuesday.

Jordan Fabian writes the White House did not offer a reason behind the canceled signing ceremony and that Trump held a “listening session” with Cabinet members and cybersecurity experts.

“I will hold my Cabinet secretaries and agency heads accountable, totally accountable for the cybersecurity of their organizations which we probably don’t have as much, certainly not as much as we need,” Trump said at the session, according to the report.

Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, told reporters the administration may not be ready to sign the order Tuesday, according to a report by Gregory Korte for USA Today.

“I think the president’s got a pretty good idea where he’s gonna go, but I think he wants to hear what [former New York] Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani and some of these other experts have to say about the steps that we can take in terms of executive action that will help secure further these critical infrastructures,” Spicer said, the report added.

A research team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has examined the propagation of radio frequency signals in three different factory settings.

The study was part of NIST’s Wireless Systems for Industrial Environments project that engages private sector partners in efforts to boost the security and reliability of industrial wireless communication platforms, the agency said Monday.

“Understanding how RF platforms work or don’t work in these harsh environments is the first step toward designing and deploying reliable wireless networks,” said Rick Candell, lead researcher of the NIST study.

“With the data from this research and future tests, we can define factors that can hinder RF propagation—including heat, vibration, reflection, interference and shielding—and then develop measures to address them.”

Candell and his colleagues assessed RF propagation characteristics in an automobile transmission assembly facility, a steam generation plant and a machine shop.

He said harsh environments present obstacles such as reflective or absorbent surfaces and competing RF signal traffic that must be addressed to deploy secure, integrated and dependable wireless platforms.

NIST researchers currently incorporate data from the factory experiments into a test bed to replicate a manufacturing environment.

The test bed is designed to help researchers study signal propagation in a controlled laboratory environment.

President Donald Trump is set to sign Tuesday an executive order that would require reviews of the U.S. government’s defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, Reuters reported Monday.

Sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that the order would authorize audit of cyber capabilities at federal agencies and seek feedback on how to build up efforts to protect critical infrastructure from cyber vulnerabilities.

Dustin Volz and Steve Holland write the news on the order comes after U.S. intelligence agencies found about Russia’s cyber hacking operations during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The executive order would require the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to submit within 60 days a review of the country’s principal cyber adversaries and ask the secretary of the Commerce Department to identify options on how to provide incentives to the private sector for the adoption of cybersecurity measures, according to a draft version of the document obtained by The Washington Post.

The proposed policy would also direct the Defense Department to collaborate with the Department of Homeland Security and National Security Agency to conduct a workforce development assessment focused on cybersecurity, according to the draft order.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected 22 teams and eight individuals for the first phase of a $3.75 million competition that seeks to leverage machine learning platforms to provide civilian and military wireless devices access to the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge calls for competitors to create a wireless spectrum paradigm that would allow radio networks to collaborate and share the RF spectrum with other networks through the use of artificial intelligence-based technologies and software-defined radios, DARPA said Monday.

“SC2 sets out to bring the software defined radio and artificial intelligence communities together to fundamentally rethink 100 years of spectrum practice, and tackle the original and enduring spectrum grand challenge: efficient coexistence of all wireless communications,” said Paul Tilghman, SC2 administrator and a program manager at DARPA’s microsystems technology office.

Six contenders obtained spots in the Proposal Track that covers $500,000 in contract funds as part of the preliminary competition, while the 24 participants vied for slots through the Open Track option of the SC2 competition that was unveiled in March 2016.

DARPA will hold the preliminary competition in December and the challenge’s second phase in December 2018 and then select the top three winners by the end of 2019.