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(TS//SI) FOSSWAY: Massive Analysis Attacks
FROM:
Advanced Analysis Lab (S211)
Run Date: 10/15/2004
(TS//SI) Members from the 5-Eyes community met in a very successful Working Party led by the
Advanced Analysis Laboratory from 14 to 16 September 2004 to determine next steps in their
collaboration on the Fossway project. Fossway is dedicated to the development of massive
analytic attacks against global metadata supported by extensive automation.
(TS//SI) It will be a catalyst for developing analytic concepts of the future and proving the
practicality and benefits of these new concepts through real-world implementations. These
analytic attacks will be designed to extract communities of interest from global networks and
identify them and the processes in which they are engaged. Successful analytic attacks will
identify new targets, as well as maintain continuity on existing targets. Fossway will help focus
analysts on higher level tasks like hypothesis generation and assessment and will seek to
automate low level functions like data manipulation. Fossway prototypes will be fully functional
and demonstrate that the concepts are achievable. They will become forcing functions for the
global SIGINT enterprise to take up these new ideas aggressively and will enable contributions
from all organizations and activities both large and small.
(TS//SI) About 90 participants from NSA, CSE, DSD, GCSB, and GCHQ discussed wide-ranging
topics organized along four tracks: Analysis and Experimentation, Data Acquisition, Systems
Engineering, and Policy. The group's conclusions included agreements to increase analytic rigor,
build a common analytic lexicon, undertake joint challenge problems and experiments and
leverage prior and ongoing work throughout the SIGINT community, as well as across other
government, commercial and academic communities. The group further agreed to form a joint
working group to drive the joint experiments. The Working Party set a number of initial actions
to be completed within the next 3 months. These include establishing systems engineering
documentation, concepts of operations, data inventories, and policy position papers. A series of
experiments will also be documented and shared within the group. The Working Party resolved
to reconvene in May 2005 to review progress on Fossway. If you would like to learn more about
FOSSWAY, contact
.
"(U//FOUO) SIDtoday articles may not be republished or reposted outside NSANet
without the consent of S0121 (DL sid_comms)."
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DERIVED FROM: NSA/CSSM 1-52, DATED 08 JAN 2007 DECLASSIFY ON: 20320108