Feds Offer $20M For Critical Open Source Energy Network Cybersecurity Tools 56
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Energy today said it would spend $20 million on the development of advanced cybersecurity tools to help protect the nation's vulnerable energy supply. The DOE technologies developed under this program should be interoperable, scalable, cost-effective advanced tools that do not impede critical energy delivery functions, that are innovative and can easily be commercialized or made available through open source for no cost."
Re:Silver Bullet Bargain (Score:4, Informative)
These guys are asking for the silver bullet to solve any cyber security problem in any system from any threat. The reward:, a measly 20 million.
It's a government contract - you don't actually have to deliver. /snark
But, yeah, for $20M my company could coordinate one hell of a automated crypto system (hardware & software) to layer on top of SCADA gear that would protect it from unauthorized use and of course it would be open source. I can think of a dozen grants that need to happen immediately on various open source networking and crypto software packages to make them better suited for the task. It would not be perfect (it cannot be) but it would be tremendously better than the status quo and it would all be free for deployment on commodity hardware or from an ecosystem of willing cooperators.
The trouble is, the requirements for government contracting self-select for companies that can't even do the paperwork for less than $20M.