Test & Evaluation · Adeptus Cyber Solutions

Cyber Test & Evaluation
and Independent Assessment.

Disciplined cyber test and evaluation for government programs, combining planning, execution, and independent assessment to produce evidence for decision makers and assessors.

Provenance

T&E grounded in a government test-center environment.

ACS personnel planned, executed, and reported sponsor-facing testing at ITEC at AFRL Rome under contract through defense prime contractors. The work evaluated cross-domain solutions against NIST 800-53 and included responsibility for policy bypass testing from an adversary perspective.

Two principles carry forward from that environment: findings must stay within what the evidence supports, and procedures must be sufficiently clear for another qualified team to reproduce the result.

The full cross-domain foundation is described on the Expertise page.

What ACS Brings to T&E

✓  Testing against NIST 800-53 security controls
✓  Adversary-perspective evaluation of security enforcement
✓  Test planning, procedures, and requirements traceability
✓  Independent findings and reporting to a government sponsor

Services

Evaluation, planning, and independent assessment.

Cyber Test & Evaluation and Adversarial Assessment

Threat-Representative Evaluation

Evaluation of a system against realistic cyber threat activity rather than a checklist. ACS assesses whether security enforcement functions as designed under adversary-representative conditions, and documents where it does not.

Because ACS personnel also perform authorized offensive work, adversarial assessment can combine planned threat-representative activity with formal evaluation rather than relying on scanning alone.

Security Control Assessment

NIST 800-53

Control-level testing and evidence generation against NIST 800-53, supporting developmental test activity, authorization packages, and continuous monitoring. ACS tests the control as implemented, not as described in the system security plan, and documents the difference where one exists.

Test Planning, Procedures & Traceability

Program Office Artifacts

The artifacts a program office needs: test plans, executable test procedures, inputs to test and evaluation master planning, and requirements-to-test traceability that demonstrates coverage rather than asserting it.

Well-written procedures are what make a test result reproducible by someone who was not in the room. That is the standard ACS writes to.

Independent Assessment & Reporting

Sponsor-Facing Findings

Findings, assessment reports, and briefings prepared for the government sponsor, including adverse results that affect program decisions. ACS personnel have held independent assessment roles in a government test environment and understand that the value of the work depends on reporting what the evidence supports.

Specialized Capability

Policy bypass testing of security filtering and data transfer systems.

Security filtering and cross-domain data transfer systems exist to enforce one guarantee: that only permitted data crosses a boundary. Testing that guarantee requires specialized analysis beyond a general assessment approach.

ACS personnel led the policy bypass section of testing in a government cross-domain evaluation environment. The question under test is straightforward to state and difficult to answer: does the control enforce the boundary as intended across the file formats and protocol behaviors in scope?

Answering it requires two capabilities at once: reverse engineering depth to establish how a control interprets data, and an adversary perspective to design test cases at the boundary of that interpretation.

What This Testing Covers

→  File-type and format-based policy bypass testing
→  Network protocol behavior as a data transfer path, including TCP and UDP
→  Evaluation of detection and filtering effectiveness against constructed test data
→  Test data generation, including steganographic test data developed as offensive test tooling
→  Findings documented against NIST 800-53 security controls

The value of this testing is not a list of techniques. It is an evidence-backed answer to the question a program office has to answer: does the boundary hold, and what is the evidence?

Test Engineering

Testing that scales, and results that reproduce.

In prior roles supporting government and defense test teams, ACS personnel helped reduce test cycle time by more than 40% while improving test-cycle reproducibility. That experience also includes building and leading agile assessment teams that expanded testing capacity for complex systems, and instrumenting CI/CD pipelines so software build and verification depended less on manual developer effort.

Test Engineering Practice

✓  Test automation and harness development
✓  CI/CD-instrumented build and verification
✓  Static and dynamic analysis integrated into the development pipeline
✓  Test team structure, capacity, and cycle time improvement
✓  Reproducibility as an explicit engineering objective

When To Bring ACS In

Three points where independent testing changes the outcome.

Prepare for a Milestone or Authorization Decision

Build traceability from requirements and controls through procedures, evidence, findings, and reporting.

Verify Security Enforcement Independently

Test what the implemented system enforces rather than relying only on plans, configuration descriptions, or supplier assertions.

Own a Defined Test Work Package

Support a prime or program office with planning, procedures, execution, and reporting written to the program’s required standard.

Related Capability

Evaluation depends on both sides of the problem.

Red Teaming

Use authorized offensive activity to measure defensive capability.

Explore Red Teaming →

Reverse Engineering

Characterize implementation behavior before designing deeper security tests.

Explore Reverse Engineering →

Get Started

Need evidence, not assurances?

Tell us what has to be tested, what you are required to demonstrate, and to whom. ACS will propose an approach and be direct about what the testing can and cannot determine.