About
Why C-STAR Exists.
C-STAR is primarily an economic development initiative. It supports jobs, business growth, research, tech-transfer, emerging technologies, and businesses.
Resilient supply chains are critical to protecting national security and consumer safety.
Industry 4.0 thinking incorporates software and hardware through open-source platforms and applications to address security, protocols, standards, transparency, and traceability throughout supply chains to ensure the safety, quality, and trust of all components, materials, and labor practices. The agreed upon protocol will accelerate business innovation and create the “USB effect” by establishing an open standard, digital supply-chain protocol.
This initiative grew from a collaboration between Oregon and Washington focused on economic development activities to support PNW priority industries, especially advanced manufacturing (Aerospace, Semiconductors, and Clean Energy).
How C-STAR Works.
C-STAR convenes public, private, and non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and industries throughout the Nation to secure supply chains, boost economic competitiveness, and build resiliency into each critical supply chain. C-STAR is working with the National Defense University (NDU) to anchor the initiative at the Eisenhower School of National Security and Resource Strategy (NDU ES). This will provide the ideal platform from where Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security initiatives can be coordinated, monitored, and measured.
C-STAR secures supply chains using the existing United States Space Force (USSF) - funded Commercial Trust™ Protocol. The Provenance Chain Network, the developer of the Commercial Trust Protocol and Dark Sky’s Technology’s software assurance and intelligence platform, Bulletproof Trust™, provides a means of satisfying government requirements for hardware and software provenance. PCN and Dark Sky teams have a proven commercial track-records with United States government agencies, including the Department of Defense, CDC, and Aerospace industries. PCN and Dark Sky will license software to be customized and applied to different industries, starting with semiconductors.
C-STAR will launch in the PNW as the pilot and demonstrable proof of concept. C-STAR is leading a network of regional entities (akin to the origins of ARPAnet), connecting a federated network of regional, distributed innovation TechHubs linking universities with priority regional industries as called for in the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. Comparative models exist within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the effects their standards development has had on local and global economies.
Who is Involved.
C-STAR includes technology partners who have evolved from DARPA, AFWerx, and SBA innovation and funding competitions who are combining capabilities to allow trading partners to build trust through incentivized collaboration with partners in their supply chains. Dark Sky partnered with The Provenance Chain Network, which provides supply chain physical chain of custody through digitizing people, places, and things to deliver traceability and permissioned transparency with infinitely nested Bills of Materials (BOM) detail. Dark Sky provides a similar review and inspection of digital Software Bills of Materials (SBOM) analyzing the origins and trustworthiness of open-source code. SIMBA Chain has developed and deployed Blockchain/Distributed Ledger tools that span multiple Blockchains providing the highest level of enterprise adoption potential.
As an example, an airplane is created from thousands of parts and runs on millions of lines of code. Gathering data from a plethora of suppliers and industry-specific supply chains, the customer and prime contractors achieve complete system transparency, with permissioned access, of all the critical elements.
This visibility allows the flight assurance teams immediate access to review critical elements or problem areas identified, narrowing their scope of review, and preventing the accidental or intentional deployment of potential vulnerabilities. Today, this work is performed manually and in a form that is not standardized (paper, digital), easily accessible, nor easily replicated. C-STAR is building digital tools to bring Industry 4.0 to life across multiple industries which are critical to the US and our economy.
This technology is designed for advanced manufacturing: aerospace, semiconductors, and clean energy. Through the involvement of these companies – and many others -- in The Consortia for Supply Chain Transparency, Analytics, and Resiliency (C-STAR), standards are being developed to contribute to software supply-chain innovation, research, technology transfer, and regulatory policy development, and provide the United States with economic resiliency and national security.
