work with state officials and the wireless carriers to define how the new first responder network will be built.
The second early stage company started under Allied Minds’ new federal R&D initiative is called Broadcast Routing Fountains. The startup was developed by scientists at The Aerospace Corp., a federally funded R&D lab in El Segundo, CA.
The idea behind Broadcast Routing Fountains is to improve security for Internet routers, which can be vulnerable to malicious attackers who gum up the networks by, for example, lying about their IP addresses or their locations.
Broadcast Routing Fountains says it can help avoid these kinds of attacks by setting up a second, separate channel for verification information, based on satellite networks. That would make it much harder for attackers to use fake IP information, since they’d have to overcome a second network.
The critical part of getting this technology into commercial use, Serafini says, is broad adoption by Internet service providers. And that means it has to be tested extensively to show the benefits are real.
“What I’m doing is trying to incubate the technology in essentially a closed intranet environment,” he says. “And there’s a number of DOD, Homeland Security, and intelligence community networks where the value proposition of the technology would be quite evident, and would be quite helpful to that network.”
Keep an eye out for more subsidiaries like these from Allied Minds Federal Innovations. And if the firm’s federal research partnership goes as planned, there could be quite a few of them to keep track of—the company says it plans to start with a $100 million investment in the partnerships, generating about 20 companies in the first year.
