RESEARCH CHARTER

Force Labs™ conducts research and public-interest analysis, including digital evidence trend mapping, social media and community risk indicators, forensic response frameworks for early action, and community impact studies and safety program development. The goal of this research is to bridge the gap between early digital harm and criminal case development so that families, schools, and local agencies can act before the situation escalates. 

 DroneWarz™ is our drone, robotics, and autonomous aerial systems research program that helped pioneer the study of airborne cyber-physical security at a time when the field had few established standards, limited threat modeling, and virtually no meaningful defense frameworks.  DroneWarz™ remains a hallmark example of the Center’s commitment to advancing cybersecurity through hands-on innovation, community collaboration, and the exploration of complex cyber-physical systems. 

The Cyber Defense Center Social Media Victimization & Community Impact Research Initiative examines how online behaviors, anonymity, and platform dynamics lead to cyberbullying, harassment, exploitation, and digital stalking. Our focus is on youth, elderly, and vulnerable populations, who often lack accessible reporting options, leaving many digital-first offenses unaddressed until they escalate into physical harm.

 The Cyber Defense Center conducts applied AI research to strengthen cyber defense, digital authenticity, and threat detection. Our work focuses on identifying machine-generated content, analyzing AI-driven cyber threats, improving automated threat-intelligence workflows, and developing safer, more resilient AI systems. This research supports community protection, law enforcement, and critical-infrastructure partners by advancing practical tools for early detection, attribution, and cyber resilience. Current research projects include ThreatSpire, PhakeOut, Code Origin, reAIl, and several others. 

The Cyber Defense Center OTSEC™ research area focuses on securing, validating, and hardening operational technology environments through adversarial modeling, consequence-driven analysis, and real-world failure simulation.

This area emphasizes resilience of industrial processes under cyber disruption conditions, protection modeling of pipelines, substations, and grid automation using our GRIDSIM products, defense strategies built around engineering constraints and process safety, live-fire and red-team/blue-team evaluations of control systems, and ensuring operators maintain safe states even during active compromises.

The Cyber Defense Center conducts specialized  testing for OT, uncommon, emerging, or highly customized technologies that fall outside traditional IT environments. This work focuses on identifying vulnerabilities and developing tailored defense strategies for products that require unique evaluation beyond standard security frameworks. Our team applies advanced methodologies including enhanced vulnerability analysis, protocol exploration, fuzzing, and customized penetration testing to help organizations understand risk in these exotic systems.

The Cyber Defense Center conducts ongoing research in force posture modeling to help organizations understand, measure, and optimize their overall defensive readiness. Our work focuses on developing analytical models that map an organization’s capabilities, resources, and defensive actions against the full spectrum of known and emerging cyber threats. Through data-driven modeling, visualization, and comparative baselines, we identify how defensive capabilities are positioned today, where gaps or inefficiencies exist, and what posture adjustments will yield the greatest improvement in resilience. 

FORCE POSTURE INTELLIGENCE.

ARM SVOTIWARTIE Mer Defense Center conducts advanced research into wartime cyber readiness, focusing on how organizations, communities, and critical infrastructure operators prepare for and respond to large-scale, multi-entity cyber conflicts. Our work includes the development of complex tabletop exercises, cross-organizational coordination models, mutual-aid frameworks, and defense capability planning that reflect real-world pressures found in national-level crises.

We study wartime-scale advisory volume, threat escalation patterns, and coordinated adversarial activity impacting critical infrastructure. 

 WARTIME PLANNING. 

The Cyber Defense Center conducts specialized research for the electricity subsector, focusing on the unique operational, regulatory, and interdependency challenges facing generation, transmission, and distribution entities. In recent multi-entity events, our research, documentation, and evidence analysis represent some of the most comprehensive records available to strengthen sector-wide understanding and preparedness. This specialized research provides utilities with realistic operational insights, rapid-response playbooks, and force-multiplying strategies that enhance resilience, improve mutual-aid coordination, and support faster, more informed decisions during complex or cascading grid events.