Prometheus 6

But Trien prefers to think of UNTAME as similar to the Borg, the cyborg collective in the TV show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” that swept the galaxy assimilating other cultures. But UNTAME is not malicious: Cybots are bound by their mission directives, which could include jobs such as network monitoring and discovery, intrusion detection, and data management.

Oak Ridge explores cybots
By William Jackson
Feb 19, 2009

Team works to develop collaborative intelligent agents to monitor networks

Imagine being able to deploy an army of software robots intelligent enough to cooperate with one another to monitor and defend the largest networks. Instead of independent devices doing a single task and reporting to a central console, the cybots would collaborate to accomplish their missions.

That is the goal of the Ubiquitous Network Transient Autonomous Mission Entities program that a team of researchers is developing at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“UNTAME is a distributed, intelligent framework,” said Joe Trien of the lab’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. The prototype network supports existing commercial tools and security devices, enabling traditional point-to-point solutions to cooperate and provide situational awareness and response capabilities in near real time.

UNTAME is the product of a long-term program by the division’s Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Research Group to develop futuristic security functionality for increasingly large, complex environments. The cybots differ from traditional software agents in that they form a collective and are aware of the condition and activities of other cybots in the collective.

“You give it a mission and tools to work with, such as mobility and intrusion sensors, and it uses those tools and cooperates with other cybots to accomplish the mission,” said Lawrence MacIntyre, one of the project’s developers.

“A cybot is more intelligent than an agent,” said Trien, the team’s leader. “When you lose an agent, you’ve lost it. But a cybot is intended to work with other cybots, continue their mission or regenerate when necessary so they can pick up where one left off.”