Army to launch Project Gatekeeper, an effort to make it easier for vendors to onboard software
The Army is set to launch Project Gatekeeper later this month, officials said Tuesday, an effort intended to speed up the onboarding of defense vendors’ software into the service’s network by using AI to vet prospective industry code in an isolated environment.
Headed by the Army’s Acting Chief Information Officer Gabe Chiulli, Project Gatekeeper will start Oct. 23. The goal is for companies interested in selling software to the Army to get their code assessed and accredited in a matter of minutes instead of months, according to officials.
“Success to me looks like a company, within minutes, is able to log in, commit their code, get the green check mark from our pipeline that says you are good to go, and they’re very quickly able to provide that code up the network to wherever they may be able to deliver,” Chiulli said.
Officials framed the initiative as part of a broader service effort to lower the barrier for companies to work with the Army, in this case without reducing cybersecurity requirements in the process. The effort comes as the cyber field is being reshaped by AI, which has increased the speed and scale at which network vulnerabilities can be exploited by malicious actors.
Chiulli acknowledged that risks for cybersecurity have proliferated, but said the Army had previously done “weird janky things” to onboard new software and that Project Gatekeeper was a way to better monitor code submissions.
“This is really an acknowledgement to that,” he said. “It’s kind of choose the battle: I either set up a framework that allows us to give industry their way to commit code to us, and we can check it very actively before it even gets pushed into our environments, and do that in a way that we are fully monitoring it, or the alternate, which is I’m not sure how they’re getting the code over to us.”
Officials said it could take days, weeks or months for some larger programs to transition code from industry environments to the Army’s, in what Chiulli described as a “mechanically painful process to deal with” for vendors.
David Wright, the chief architect for the Army’s Software and Innovation Center, said interested vendors would previously have to become familiar with the government’s security practices before “they can even begin to deliver value to the government.”
The officials highlighted Authority to Operate (ATO), an approval process for vendors to deploy software onto Army networks, as a barrier. Chiulli said certain Army organizations wouldn’t talk to vendors unless they had one.
Under Project Gatekeeper, companies can submit code for AI scanning before they’re on contract or respond to a request for information, for example. Then, officials said, if a program manager takes on the software through acquisition pathways, it is already vetted.
The objective is to let vendors “provide software tools to the government, so that we can begin to immediately see value from the work that they’re doing without all those additional barriers,” Wright said. “The idea here is not to lessen the security requirements, but more to make the process more accessible and available, so that they can get immediate feedback and understand what it is that needs to be adjusted or corrected before these things are brought into an Army environment.”
He said the Army was working with the General Services Administration (GSA) to integrate its sign-on service into Project Gatekeeper by mid-November to make the effort “actually commercially accessible.”
