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05 30 2016

NCI Agency Announces Winners of the Inaugural Defence Innovation Challenge

The NATO Communications and Information Agency is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Defence Innovation Challenge, aimed at accelerating transformational, state-of-the-art technology solutions from small business and academia in support of NATO C4ISR and cyber capabilities.

Small businesses and academia from all 28 Allies were invited to submit proposals in four focus areas of cyber defence, Internet of Things, military applications of blockchains, and cognitive computing and machine learning.

The top 10 innovators and their technologies are:

  • RangeForce (Estonia): Hands-on cyber security simulation training for IT staff, discovery of new cyber talent internally, and recruiting external talent based on candidates' practical skills.
  • Osirium (United Kingdom): Management tool to monitor and control privileged accounts through identity and role, restricting abuse of privileged accounts.
  • QuarksLab (France): Incident Response and Malware Analysis (IRMA).
  • AvePoint Public Sector, Inc. (USA): Automatic document classification.
  • Ntrepid Corporation (USA): A secure virtual browser to limit impact of attacks through browsers.
  • Vector Synergy (Poland): Cyber Defence training range and training tools.
  • NVISO (Belgium): Security sensors for IDS and data storage. Semi-automatic tagging and processing of alerts.
  • Digital Shadows (United Kingdom): A scalable data analysis platform that provides a complete, "attacker's eye view" of an organization's digital footprint.
  • Be Informed (Netherlands): Data analysis and visualization to identify relationships in network traffic.
  • Terida Systems (Canada): Protecting information flow for the supply chain and contractor logistics support.

NCI Agency Announces Winners of the Inaugural Defence Innovation Challenge

The NCI Agency received a total of 65 proposals representing small businesses and academia from 12 Allies. The University of Nebraska at Omaha was the sole participant from academia, with a submission on SecuWear, an open source, multi-component hardware/software platform for exploring wearable security.

"The large number of high quality proposals we received made selection difficult," said NCI Agency General Manager Koen Gijsbers. "However, it also signals the vast potential for small businesses and academia throughout the Alliance to contribute to NATO cyber defence, and we will be working hard in the coming months to create mechanisms for closer engagement with them."

The top finishers' technology solutions will be showcased at the 2016 NCI Agency Conference and AFCEA TechNet International (NITEC16), 'Building Resilience through Secure C4ISR: NATO-Industry Collaboration in a New Era', that will take place from 7 to 9 June in Tallinn, Estonia.