NTIA's ITS to Host Feb. 15-16 Workshop on Tactical Encryption, Key Management

NTIA’s Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) plans a Feb. 15-16 workshop in Boulder, Colorado, on tactical encryption and key management (E&KM). RAND Corp. is co-hosting the workshop, which is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NTIA said in a notice set to run in Friday's Federal Register. The workshop aims to “identify solutions to the problem of how to dynamically key and re-key different groups with varying levels of access and for varying lengths of time using existing infrastructure or over an ad hoc network that is reliable and user friendly,” NTIA said. E&KM “is a process that can be onerous, difficult, and time-consuming. We hypothesize that advances in processing efficiency and networking technologies can greatly simplify (or perhaps even automate) E&KM thus enabling secure dynamic coalitions and information flow control in mobile, tactical applications. We further hypothesize that these secure, dynamic coalitions and information control schemes can be constructed and maintained without a central, off-site coordination authority.” ITS hopes the workshop will “look into the future to see what E&KM may look like and will look at the present to see what technologies can be leveraged to take us there,” NTIA said. The workshop will run 8 a.m.-5 p.m. MST both days in the Department of Commerce’s Boulder Laboratories Building 1 Lobby, NTIA said.