DARPA Partners with RTX’s BBN to Boost Cyber Threat Detection Using New STALAGMITE Test Platform

In a major step toward advancing cybersecurity, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected RTX’s BBN Technologies to play a central role in its latest program aimed at improving how cyber threats are identified and tackled. The initiative, called INGOTS (Intelligent Generation of Tools for Security), is designed to create better and faster ways to detect software vulnerabilities and develop effective defenses.

As part of this program, BBN Technologies will develop an advanced platform named STALAGMITE. This is not just another software tool—it’s a large-scale, hybrid test environment that will combine both virtual and physical systems to simulate real-world Android software vulnerabilities. This setup will allow researchers to run automated, repeatable experiments to test how hacking attempts unfold and how different security measures perform against them.

The key innovation here is scale and speed. Traditional cyber defense testing relies heavily on manual work, which is often slow, expensive, and hard to replicate. STALAGMITE aims to change that by offering a more automated and scalable alternative. With it, cybersecurity researchers can quickly generate data on how exploits happen and refine countermeasures much more efficiently.

This effort is part of a broader U.S. strategy to improve national cyber defense capabilities. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has already identified more than 1,300 actively exploited vulnerabilities, stressing the urgency for better threat detection tools. DARPA’s INGOTS program focuses on automating the entire process of modeling and analyzing exploit chains—sequences of vulnerabilities that cyber attackers often use together to breach systems.

Over a period of 36 months, INGOTS will roll out in three phases, delivering both cutting-edge research and practical cybersecurity tools. The outcomes are expected to benefit a wide range of networks, from personal devices to government systems and even military infrastructure.

By developing STALAGMITE, RTX’s BBN Technologies is now at the forefront of this effort—building a future where detecting and stopping cyber threats becomes faster, more accurate, and far more scalable than ever before.