The Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center partnered with George Mason University to help address challenges in the full-scale launch of its Vulnerability Disclosure Program.
The collaboration was made possible through the National Security Innovation Network Capstone program, which is comprised of entrepreneurs and student technologists with innovations that are potentially beneficial to the DOD, the defense agency said Tuesday.
VDP began in 2016 as a pilot program with the Defense Industrial Base and was was designed to cast a wider net of protection for the DOD Information Network. Although the pilot proved successful, it faced scalability obstacles such as a larger workforce to meet higher demand for services.
A team from George Mason University Information Systems and Operations Management analyzed the lessons learned from the program and made recommendations to help resolve its labor-intensive challenges. Among the suggested solutions was the creation of a cloud-based portal to support DIB companies going through the VDP onboarding phase.
After eight weeks, the recommendations led to a 50-hour reduction in labor hours spent on the program, as well as a decline in onboarding processing time from eight hours to one hour per company. VDP expanded its DIB companies from 50 to 1,000 for the same operational budget.