Cybersecurity businessDHS S&T announces licensing of cyber security technology

The other day, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced that technology from its Cyber Security Division Transition to Practice (TTP) program has been licensed for market commercialization. This is S&T’s second technology that has successfully gone through the program to the commercial market. The technology, Hyperion, developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is a malware forensics detection and software assurance technology which has been licensed to R&K Cyber Solutions LLC, a Manassas, Virginia-based application development and cyber solution company.

“The best technology ideas remain just ideas until they can be commercialized and put to use,” said DHS Under Secretary for Science and Technology Dr. Reginald Brothers. “I am proud that S&T’s Transition-to-Practice program has facilitated getting another outstanding research project out of the lab and into the marketplace.”

In 2012 the TTP program identified Hyperion as a promising candidate for further development and transition to the commercial marketplace. By calculating the behavior of software, the Hyperion technology has the ability to detect malware. Through the TTP program, Hyperion was introduced to private industry partners, and quickly generated interest from R&K to make the technology commercially available.

Established in 2012 as part of S&T’s Cybersecurity Division in an effort to support the Department’s mission of improving the nation’s cybersecurity capabilities, the TTP program looks to transition federally funded cybersecurity technologies from the laboratory to consumers. The program, led by S&T’s Michael Pozmantier, also seeks to create institutional relationships between the cyber research community, investors, end users, and information technology companies.

Last year S&T announced the first technology, the Quantum Secured Communication, which transitioned to the commercial market through the TTP program, two years ahead of schedule. The Quantum Secured Communication is an encryption system used to protect the nation’s critical cyber infrastructure.

S&T notes that each year the TTP program selects a handful of promising cyber technologies to incorporate into its thirty-six-month program. S&T introduces these technologies to end users around the country with the end goal of transitioning them to investors, developers or manufacturers that can advance them and turn them into commercially viable products.

Throughout the year, S&T will host events around the country to showcase the technologies for companies from the energy, financial, and the government sectors in order to develop pilot opportunities, and to turn these into commercially available products. The next TTP technology demonstration event, TTP Investors, Integrators and IT companies — West, will be held in Silicon Valley on 19 May 2015.

Currently, the TTP program has twenty-four technologies (eight from fiscal year 2013, nine from 2014, and seven from 2015) which are ready for transition to the marketplace.

With the success of the Hyperion technology transition, S&T hopes commercial technology partners and end users will take notice of other technologies, not only in the TTP program, but in the entire government R&D community, as solutions to complex problems.