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Will Roper: Air Force Should ‘Hack’ Federal Acquisition System
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Will Roper: Air Force Should ‘Hack’ Federal Acquisition System

Will Roper, assistant secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics at the U.S. Air Force and a three-time Wash100 Award winner, said he believes the service must hack the federal procurement system to be relevant and one way to do that is by reassessing current acquisition regulations, Federal News Network reported Tuesday. 

Roper said he is working with financial management offices and the general counsel on a new memo to add more flexibility to one-year funding for operations and maintenance of systems, also known as 3400 money.

“I don’t think the original envision of different colors of money was not to allow us to do common sense things. It’s to operate and sustain. I think the implication is operate and sustain relevant things. If you are creating a completely new bomber instead of sustaining your old one, you’ve crossed the line and you know that,” Roper said at the National Contract Management Association event.

“If you are making reasonable improvements to your system to keep it relevant for the original purpose to which it was built, that is what that account is for and we have given that up. It’s a great example of the kind of conservatism that has now overwrought our system into being intransigent and inflexible,” he added.

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NCCoE Asks Feedback on Draft Report on Securing Containers in Multitenant Clouds
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NCCoE Asks Feedback on Draft Report on Securing Containers in Multitenant Clouds

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a draft internal report on an approach based on hardware-enabled security to help protect application containers in multi-tenant cloud environments.

NCCoE said Monday that the document also provides information about the prototype implementation that the general security community can use as a template or blueprint.

The document also describes the three stages of the prototype implementation. Stage 0 focuses on platform attestation and measured worker node launch. Stage 1 deals with trusted workload placement, while Stage 2 focuses on asset tagging and trusted location.

Comments and feedback on the draft report “Hardware-Enabled Security: Container Platform Security Prototype” are due Jan. 29th.

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FCC Auctions Additional Mid-Band Spectrum for 5G; Ajit Pai Quoted
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FCC Auctions Additional Mid-Band Spectrum for 5G; Ajit Pai Quoted

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has freed up 280 megahertz of mid-band spectrum in the 3.7-3.98 gigahertz band for 5G networks. The mid-band 5G spectrum auction will make available 5,684 flexible-use overlay licenses based on partial economic areas, FCC said Tuesday.

“By freeing up this wide swath of critical mid-band spectrum, the FCC is paving the way for Americans to receive fast 5G wireless services,” said FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.

The commission received commitments from satellite operators using the C-band to free up the 3.7-3.98 GHz band and move into the C-band’s upper portion. The transition’s initial phase is expected to be completed by Dec. 5, 2021, while the next phase will conclude by Dec. 5, 2023.

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DOE Launches Funding Opportunity for Nuclear Data Research Projects; Chris Fall Quoted
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DOE Launches Funding Opportunity for Nuclear Data Research Projects; Chris Fall Quoted

The Department of Energy (DOE) intends to award $12 million in funds to support research efforts that aim to enhance the collection of nuclear data.

DOE said Monday it seeks to grow and optimize the data quality required for nuclear activities such as isotope production and nuclear science efforts.

Topics of interest under the funding opportunity will also include identification of nuclear contraband, cross-cutting experiments on basic nuclear science as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence-based methods for nuclear data curation.

"This program targets cross-cutting opportunities to enhance the curation of existing nuclear data archives as well as research to lay the groundwork for new applications in areas of national need," said Chris Fall, director at DOE's office of science.

Awardees will be chosen via a competitive peer review process and is set to receive $1 million in funds annually. 

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M-Code Early Use Signal Achieves Operational Acceptance
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M-Code Early Use Signal Achieves Operational Acceptance

The U.S. Space Force issued an operational acceptance certification for a military signal developed to equip warfighters with augmented anti-spoofing and anti-jamming capabilities.

GPS Military-Code Early Use underwent a series of tests at master control stations at Vandenberg Air Force Base and Schriever AFB to achieve the certification, USSF said.

The certification will enable future Military GPS User Equipment technology to request for early usage of the M-Code frequency to transmit secure position, navigation and timing data to warfighters.

MCEU works with a software-defined receiver installed at six Space Force monitoring sites. The frequency ran for a trial period since June and helped the Operational Control Segment Architecture Evolution Plan task, upload and monitor M-Code signals within a GPS constellation.

Lockheed Martin secured a $45.5 million contract modification in 2017 to develop MCEU software for GPS satellites.

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Space Operations Command Assumes Control Authority Over Lockheed-Made AEHF-6 Satellite
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Space Operations Command Assumes Control Authority Over Lockheed-Made AEHF-6 Satellite

The U.S. Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center handed control authority of the sixth Lockheed Martin-built Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellite to Space Operations Command in late October.

Space Vehicle 6 completes the AEHF satellite constellation designed to provide military leaders and warfighters jam-resistant communications and command and control capabilities during a nuclear war, the Los Angeles Air Force Base said.

Operational acceptance of the sixth AEHF satellite is expected to occur before the end of 2020 and the 4th Space Operation Squadron will gain operational control as the Lockheed-made SV-06 is integrated into the constellation system, which also supports Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and the U.K.

“AEHF enables both strategic and tactical users to communicate globally across a high-speed network that delivers protected communications – including real-time video, battlefield maps and targeting data — in any environment,” said Erik Daehler, director of protected communications at Lockheed Martin Space.

The AEHF-6 satellite launched in March aboard United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket that took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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Biden Picks Xavier Becerra, Rochelle Walensky as HHS, CDC Heads
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Biden Picks Xavier Becerra, Rochelle Walensky as HHS, CDC Heads

President-elect Joe Biden has nominated Xavier Becerra and Rochelle Walensky to serve in the respective roles of secretary of health and human services (HHS) and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Becerra has been serving as California’s 33rd attorney general since 2017 while Walensky is currently the chief of Massachusetts General Hospital's division of infectious diseases, Biden’s transition team said Monday.

Becerra, who previously served 12 terms as a member of the House of Representatives, will become the first Department of Health and Human Services secretary of Latino descent if confirmed for the role.

Vivek Murthy and Marcella Nunez-Smith, co-chairs of Biden’s COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board, have also been selected to respectively serve as U.S. Surgeon General and chair of the COVID-19 Equity Task Force.

Other appointees to Biden's health team include Anthony Fauci as COVID-19 chief medical adviser to the president, Jeffrey Zients as COVID-19 response coordinator and counselor to the president; and Natalie Quillian as deputy coordinator for COVID-19 response.

Fauci previously served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases while Zients previously held director roles at the National Economic Council and Office of Management and Budget. Quillian was most recently Biden's deputy campaign manager.

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Space Development Agency Envisions New Continuous Market for Satellite Procurement; Derek Tournear Quoted
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Space Development Agency Envisions New Continuous Market for Satellite Procurement; Derek Tournear Quoted

The Space Development Agency (SDA) seeks to establish a stable, continuous satellite technology market that would remain ongoing regardless of specific programs, DoD News reported Monday. 

SDA needs industry's help to establish the National Defense Space Architecture, an architecture of satellites that would collect and transmit targeting and location data for military operations

Derek Tournear, SDA director, said the government-industry effort may create a new, constant satellite market to achieve this goal.

Tournear said virtually at Via Satellite's MilSatCom Digital Week that he needs industry to internally develop products in line with a plan to add hundreds of satellites to the architecture every other year.

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NSA Releases Cybersecurity Advisory on Russian-Backed Threat Actors Exploiting VMware Tools
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NSA Releases Cybersecurity Advisory on Russian-Backed Threat Actors Exploiting VMware Tools

The National Security Agency (NSA) has issued a warning on Russian-backed hackers that utilize a vulnerability in various VMware products to breach protected data housed in affected systems. NSA said Monday that the cyber threat affects VMware’s Identity Manager, Identity Manager Connector, Access Connector and Workspace One Access tools.

The state-sponsored malicious actors exploit the vulnerability to access a device’s management interface and forge security assertion markup language credentials to access private information.

NSA said it “strongly recommends” the Department of Defense (DoD), National Security System (NSS) and defense industrial base to implement vendor-provided patches to designated VMware identity management tools “as soon as possible.”

The cybersecurity advisory details cybersecurity recommendations such as monitoring authentication server configurations and server logs.

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DoDIN Joint HQ Sets Framework for Information Access, Operations; Brig. Gen. Paul Fredenburgh Quoted
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DoDIN Joint HQ Sets Framework for Information Access, Operations; Brig. Gen. Paul Fredenburgh Quoted

The Joint Force Headquarters for the Department of Defense Information Networks (Joint Force HQ-DoDIN) has established four primary components of a framework to guide how personnel would access information, C4ISRnet reported Monday.

These four pillars tackle how to organize a battlespace, use cyber risk assessment methods, make threat-focused decisions via automated approaches and collaboratively address network security requirements.

The command-centric framework is designed to organize DoDIN-related activities, Brig. Gen. Paul Fredenburgh, deputy commander of Joint Force HQ-DoDIN, said at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association or AFCEA TechNet virtual conference.

“Operationalizing the secure, operate-and-defend mission area is at the heart of outmaneuvering adversaries in the cyber domain as we establish priorities for and direct network operations, security actions and unified defensive efforts across DoDIN," he said.

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