SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Critical to our nation’s space superiority is the tactical operator’s ability to receive and send all-domain data in a consolidated, timely, secure manner for national decision-makers to be able to confidently observe, orient, decide, and act on the data in real time. Currently, the disparate way data is being delivered is not keeping pace with the tactical timelines of the threats identified. AFRL/RV Hybrid Architecture Demonstration Program (HAD) has been tasked to address a defense mission need to manage the space data infrastructure to provide a secure and scalable hybrid data environment. The US Space Force, Combatant Command operators, strategic decision makers, and tactical users need capabilities that can support hybrid data architectures to pull, store, move, analyze, correlate, display and push any kind of data to any user at any given time from any source in space or on earth. HAD has identified Kinnami’s resilient hybrid data fabric as a likely solution to effectively meet this defense mission need. Kinnami is a secure data management company that has developed AmiShare, a first-of-its-kind platform that reimagines data resiliency by providing data availability, protection and security on distributed systems eliminating the current IT patchwork. The platform allows organizations to manage and secure data for satellites as well as ground systems. New data are broken up into pieces, individually encrypted and distributed around a network of participating devices. This secures data by widening the attack surface and protects them from loss by duplication and versioning. AI-based autonomous behavior and replicated data offer more resilient responses to network connectivity or device failure. Degradation of data availability across the system is more graceful than the 100% on or off, centralized approach. This approach to resiliency directly mirrors a constellation of satellites providing a more resilient solution than a single satellite. Preliminary areas of interest HAD wants to explore with Kinnami: Dynamic data routing switching between assorted orbital military/commercial networks, downlinking through diverse ground stations, interfacing with cloud architectures. Software that can be rapidly adopted across commercial and military networks and easily integrated into military internet-of-things applications. Enabling end-users to adjust trust factors commensurate with risk or mission application for both data sources and network paths. Tactical tasking tools that will enable battlefield exploitation of on-orbit assets. During this Phase I project, we will identify the necessary capabilities and requirements to meet HAD’s needs. This will be used to develop a Phase II project support by HAD for a proof-of-concept utilizing Kinnami’s distributed resilient data platform to address HAD specific challenges for resilient secure data management across ground systems, satellites, and other space-based assets.
