DISA's director is looking to "reimagine the workplace."
Lt. Gen. Alan Lynn explained during a keynote address June 13 at the Defensive Cyber Operations Symposium in Baltimore that while currently personnel are prohibited from bringing their cellphones into the Department of Defense due to security concerns, he wants to "flip that on its ear."
Lynn imagines that personnel will take their devices — phones, laptops — with them, creating greater mobility and serving as an integral part of the next generation of Common Access Cards and identity authentication.
Lynn has been discussing the next generation of CAC cards for a year now, offering solutions such as behavior monitoring and pattern of life monitoring to authenticate a specific user as opposed to a plastic card that is used now and, if stolen, could be used to easily gain access to networks.
On Tuesday, Lynn offered another solution for war fighters for which traditional biometric solutions to include fingerprint and facial recognition would be ineffective given the extensive gear they often wear: gait.
"So gait is your walk. Your walk is as individual as your fingerprint," Lynn said. "Your gait, your walk, that's going to be there."
A person's individual gait could be a factor in authenticating their identity to allow them access to portions of the network and facilities.
Lynn added that he sees the future as not only a mobile network, but determining what one's level of access based upon the amount of identity that is being provided to one's device combining several specific behavioral traits and biometrics.
"That's a future we are currently working on," he said.
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for C4ISRNET, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
