Mitre Corporation

The Mitre Corporation (stylized as The MITRE Corporation and MITRE) is an American

MITRE formed in 1958 as a military think tank, spun out from the radar and computer research at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Over the years, MITRE's field of study had greatly diversified. In the 1990s, with the winding down of the Cold War, private companies complained that MITRE had an unfair advantage competing for civilian contracts; in 1996 this led to the civilian projects being spun off to a new company, Mitretek. Mitretek was renamed Noblis in 2007.

Etymology

The name MITRE was created by

MITRE was founded in Bedford, Massachusetts in 1958,^[6] spun off from the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.^[7] MITRE's first employees had been developing the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system and aerospace defense as part of Lincoln Labs Division 6. They were specifically engaged in MIT's research and engineering of the project.

MITRE's early leadership has been described as "a mix of men" affiliated with the Ford Foundation, the Institute for Defense Analyses, RAND Corporation, System Development Corporation (SDC), and the United States Armed Forces, including Horace Rowan Gaither, James Rhyne Killian, James McCormack, and Julius Adams Stratton.^[8]

In April 1959, a site was purchased in Bedford, Massachusetts, near Hanscom Air Force Base, to develop a new MITRE laboratory, which MITRE occupied in September 1959.^[9] MITRE established an office in McLean in 1963,^[7] and had approximately 850 technical employees by 1967.^[10] MITRE registered the first .org domain on July 10, 1985, which continues to be used by the company.^[11][12] During the 1980s, the German hacker Markus Hess used an unsecured Mitre Tymnet connection as an entry point for intrusions into U.S. Department of Defense, Department of Energy, and NASA computer networks.^[13] By 1989, the company had thousands of employees in Bedford and McLean; approximately 3,000 employees in the "command, control, communications and intelligence" ("C3I")^[7] division oversaw military projects, while non-military projects were handled by the civilian division, which had approximately 800 employees based in McLean.^[14]

By the 1990s, MITRE had become a "multifaceted engineering company with a wide range of clients," according to Kathleen Day of The Washington Post.

MITRE restructured its research and engineering operations in mid 2020, forming MITRE Labs. Approximately half of MITRE's employees work under the unit, which seeks to "further extend the parent organization's impact across federally-funded research-and-development centers and with partners in academia and industry".^[15]

The nonprofit foundation MITRE Engenuity (or simply Engenuity) was launched in 2019 "to collaborate with the private sector on solving industrywide problems with cyber defense" in collaboration with corporate partners.

MITRE manages six FFRDCs. The National Security Engineering Center, previously known as the C3I Federally Funded Research and Development Center until 2011, addresses national security issues for the Department of Defense.[6]^[19]

MITRE's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) supports the FAA, an agency within the Department of Transportation.^[20]

The organization's Center for Enterprise Modernization, which focuses on enterprise modernization, was established as the IRS Federally Funded Research and Development Center in 1998, before being renamed in August 2001. Originally sponsored by the Internal Revenue Service (a bureau of the Department of the Treasury), the Department of Veterans Affairs joined as a co-sponsor in 2008,^[21] and the Social Security Administration joined as a co-sponsor in 2018.^[19]

MITRE's Homeland Security Systems Engineering and Development Institute (HSSEDI) completes work for the Department of Homeland Security, such as maintaining the federal executive department's list of the 25 most common software bugs.^[22] The HSSEDI was established in 2009, following passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002,^[23] and along with the Homeland Security Studies and Analysis Institute replaced the Homeland Security Institute.^[19]

MITRE's CMS Alliance to Modernize Healthcare was established in 2012 as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Federally Funded Research and Development Center, also known as the Health FFRDC. The FFRDC is sponsored by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services.^[19]

MITRE has managed the

Currently, MITRE holds the contract to administer and provide management to JASON, an advisory group for the federal government made up of scientists.^[25]

Policy

MITRE's Center for Data-Driven Policy, established in 2020, seeks to "provide evidence-based, objective and nonpartisan insights for government policymaking".^[26]

The Center for Technology & National Security, now part of the Center for Data-Driven Policy, was created to link MITRE "with senior government officials for research and development purposes". Members of the advisory board include John F. Campbell, Lisa Disbrow, William E. Gortney, Robert B. Murrett, and Robert O. Work, as of mid 2020.^[27]

Projects

National security

U.S. military forces, especially the

MITRE has also focused on the great power competition; in 2020, the company published a paper about 5G networks and competition between China and the U.S.^[34]

Airspace, Global Positioning System (GPS), and aerospace

In addition to military work, MITRE's early projects included

MITRE has worked on the traffic collision avoidance system of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), a modernization project of the National Airspace System (NAS).^[37] MITRE's Integrated Demonstration and Experimentation for Aeronautics (IDEA) Lab has assessed the impact of new technologies for the FAA since 1992. In addition to air traffic management and aviation regulations, the group has worked on merging unmanned aerial vehicle operations into the NAS as well as defining how the system will function in 2035, a decade after the scheduled implementation of NextGen.^[38]

MITRE has explored the use of mobile devices for communicating instrument flight rules, specifically clearances at airports lacking Pre-Departure Clearance/Data Comm Clearance.^[39] The company's Pacer web application uses System Wide Information Management and Traffic Flow Management System data as well as airline and general aviation departure schedules to "improve the way that general aviation operators file for and obtain departure clearances".^[40]

MITRE has also completed air traffic control and safety work for the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS).^[41] The company's Singapore-based unit was hired by CAAS to consider how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and speech recognition could be used to improve air traffic management systems.^[42][43] Among MITRE's innovations was a "speech recognition prototype that will automate and shorten the transcription process during an aviation incident investigation".^[44]

MITRE and the

The MITRE ATT&CK framework, launched in 2015,[47] has been described by Computer Weekly as "the free, globally accessible service that offers comprehensive and current cyber security threat information" to organizations,^[48] and by TechTarget as a "global knowledge base of threat activity, techniques and models".^[47] The framework has been used by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI. Version 14.1 was released in October 2023.^[47] According to a 2020 study published by the University of California, Berkeley and security software company McAfee, 80 percent of companies use the framework for cybersecurity.^[49]

The Structured Threat Information eXchange (STIX), described as a "machine-to-machine cyber threat information-sharing language", was developed by MITRE and the Department of Homeland Security. The program facilitates information sharing between industry, critical infrastructure operators and government in order to blunt cyberattacks" and allows participants to share data via the Trusted Automated eXchange of Indicator Information (TAXII). Program governance was granted to the global nonprofit consortium OASIS in 2015, and STIX 2.0 was approved in 2017.^[50]

In September 2020, the U.S. Air Force awarded a $463 million contract to continue work for the National Security Engineering Center, an FFRDC supporting the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. The contract will provide cybersecurity, electronics, information technology, sensors, and systems engineering services in Bedford and McLean for one year.^[6] Microsoft and MITRE partnered on the open source Adversarial Machine Learning Threat Matrix in collaboration with IBM, Nvidia, and academic institutions. Launched in October 2020, the framework is "designed to organize and catalogue known techniques for attacks against machine-learning systems, to inform security analysts and provide them with strategies to detect, respond and remediate against threats".^[51]

In February 2020, MITRE launched SQUINT, a free app allowing election officials to report misinformation on social media; the app was being used by eleven U.S. states, as of October 2020.^[52][53] The company also established the National Election Security Lab, offering free risk assessments for voting systems.^[54]

Other projects include the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database of vulnerabilities and exposures related to information security and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) category system for software weaknesses and vulnerabilities.^[55][56]

Government innovation

MITRE and the British startup company Simudyne partnered to convert an "agent-based" financial risk model of "asset fire-sales and investor flight from banks and funds into a commercial product". The new system is based on one MITRE had previously created for the Department of the Treasury.^[57] MITRE has also researched cloud computing policy,^[58] helped the U.S. federal government identify fraudulent comments intended to "spoof" public support for non-existent positions during the rulemaking process,^[59] and increased the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue's delinquent taxpayer compliance rate.^[60]

Health care

In 1982, Mitre authored a proposal for the State Department called "Cannabis Eradication in Foreign Western Nations." In this proposal, a plan was outlined to eradicate cannabis in participating nations within 121 days, for $19 million. The report discussed the use and safety considerations of

During the 1980s, MITRE worked on a digital radiological imaging project for MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and an upgrade to MEDLINE for the National Institutes of Health.^[14] Synthea, MITRE's open source synthetic data system, "mirrors real population information in terms of demographics, disease burden, vaccinations, medical visits and social determinants",^[62] and seeks to "mimic how each patient progresses from birth to death through modular representations of various diseases and conditions".^[63] MITRE's patient data set SyntheticMass, based on "fictional" Massachusetts residents, was formatted by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources and made available to developers via Google Cloud in 2019.^[62]

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