Project Description

The SIGINT Enabling Project actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable through SIGINT collection (e.g., Endpoint, MidPoint, etc.) with foreknowledge of the modification. To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact. In this way, the SIGINT Enabling approach uses commercial technology and insight to manage the increasing cost and technical challenges of discovering and successfully exploiting systems of interest within the ever-more integrated and security-focused global communications environment.

This Project supports the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) by investing in corporate partnerships and providing new access to intelligence sources, reducing collection and exploitation costs of existing sources', and enabling expanded network operation and intelligence exploitation to support network defense and cyber situational awareness.

Base resources in this project are used to:

• Insert vulnerabilities into commercial systems, IT systems, networks, and endpoint communications devices used by targets.
• Collect target network data and metadata via cooperative network carriers and/or increased control over core networks.
• Leverage commercial capabilities to remotely deliver or receive information to and from target endpoints.
• Exploit foreign trusted computing platforms and technologies.
• Influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies.
• Make specific and aggressive investments to facilitate the development of a robust exploitation capability against Next-Generation Wireless (NGW) communications.
• Provide for continued partnerships with major telecommunications carriers to shape the global network to benefit other collection accesses and allow the continuation of partnering with commercial Managed Security Service Providers and threat researchers, doing threat/vulnerability analysis.
• Continue relationships with commercial IT partners and capitalize on new opportunities, including the enabling of used by the governments; enable the being used in a high interest satellite signal, which allows access to the communications being carried on a commercial satellite provider.
• Reach full operating capability for SIGINT access to data flowing through a hub for a major commercial communications provider and assess its long term benefits.
• Reach full operating capability for SIGINT access to a major Internet Peer-to-Peer voice and text communications system.
• Make gains in enabling and Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) access to fourth generation/Long Term Evolution networks via enabling.
• Assess existing wireless calling metadata accesses and balance flow of this data into with the ability to ingest and utilize this information.
• Assess existing commercial cyber information flows and balance the flow of this data into with the ability to ingest and analyze this information to support cyber situational awareness.
• Shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS (i.e. Central Security Service).
• Reflects additional level of investment in enabling exploitation capabilities against NGW mobile and data networks.
• Enables additional support to Endpoint operations. Support to this mission area requires SIGINT Enabling to invest in new infrastructure and capabilities with commercial partners.