Altron, Inc. Wins (STTR) US Navy Innovation Research/Technology Transfer Award
Unified Logging Solution for Performance and Cybersecurity Monitoring for NAVSEA’s Undersea Warfare Programs
June 4th, 2019 Charleston, SC
Altron, Inc has been awarded a prime contract within the small business technology transfer program to incorporate Altron’s UnifyRT (Real-Time) solution to create a unified logging architecture that supports collection, aggregation, storage, and analysis of system performance and cybersecurity logs, events, and alerts produced by a multitude of customer-specialized Control Systems for Government, Commercial, and Residential use. This represents Altron’s second research innovation award, to complement their iSo software product that detects, isolates, visualizes and tracks targets in a video stream – providing relative target points of reference, range estimates and movement predictions using artificial intelligence/machine learning concepts.
Altron’s UnifyRT solution includes operational capabilities of components – namely our UnifyRT Admin Tool, UnifyRT Server Clusters, as well as support for multiple client logging plugins. Altron’s proprietary system and solution architecture will incorporate performance and cybersecurity monitoring capabilities at the host and network level, based on standards, guidelines, and best practices documented in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework and Department of the Navy Chief Information Officer (DONCIO) cybersecurity policy and guidance. Security controls and multi-level security practices will be implemented and verified, along with the proper management of docker key/cert management concepts. Additional custom logging plugins are under development that will interface with fluentd.
At the node level, UnifyRT ensures performance monitoring capabilities to provide telemetry metrics (e.g., memory usage, central processing unit usage, disk usage, etc.), where we are researching use cases for incorporating Altron’s software and plugins that support analytics tools, predictive monitoring tools, etc. Our cybersecurity monitoring capability will also provide information relevant to the cybersecurity status of the node (e.g., logged in users, connected devices, running processes, network port status, file integrity, etc.). The architecture will support production and consumption of data streams through a secure and modular interface by employing open standards such as transport layer security (TLS) for secure transmission and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) for data exchange Additionally, new consumers of data streams, such as a security incident and event manager (SIEM), will be able to analyze existing data streams without requiring modification of the UnifyRT logging architecture. The Altron solution will support the network performance and security monitoring through the appropriately located network taps and/or switch monitoring ports that provide system network traffic to a network intrusion detection system (NIDS) platform and a network security monitoring (NSM) platform, to permit the computer network traffic to be analyzed and monitored; and alerts generated as needed.
Contact Mike Gercken at mgercken@altroninc.com for further information.
Altron is a Woman-Owned Small Business, providing systems engineering, cybersecurity, and professional services for over 25 years, built upon the values of… Doing What’s Right – It’s Right to be Honest | Doing Our Best – with a commitment to excellence in everything we do | Treating People Fairly – with Dignity and Respect | and by Having Fun and Enjoying the Journey