Program Summary
Commercial Test and Measurement equipment has advanced greatly with the emergence of sophisticated cellular and wireless local area network technology and can be used to intercept, analyze and exploit our military communications signals. Building upon technologies investigated under the COMMEX Program, the Computational Leverage Against Surveillance Systems (CLASS) program seeks new ways to protect our signals from increasingly sophisticated adversaries and to do so in a way that can be maintained as technology advances.
Three different techniques are being developed: 1) Waveform Complexity uses advanced communications waveforms that are difficult to recover without knowledge and understanding of the signals itself; 2) Spatial Diversity uses distributed communications devices and the communication environment to disguise and dynamically vary the apparent location of the signal; 3) Interference Exploitation makes use of the clutter in the signal environment to make it difficult for an adversary to isolate a particular signal. The objective of the program is to make modular communications technology that is inexpensive to incorporate in existing and emerging radio systems (<$100 incremental cost) but pushes adversaries to need more than 1,000x our processing power - "supercomputer" level processing power.
Technologies from this program are planned to transfer to the U.S. Army's Communications - Electronics Command.