About Us and FAQ

What is Adversarial Apps?

Adversarial Apps is an open source student-led project made for UCF Senior Design and sponsored by NSIN and NC DEFTECH. Our mission is to aid start-up companies in searching for business partners whose affiliation will not invalidate them from bidding on United States government contracts.

How do we assess companies?

To assess companies in a fair and transparent way, we have determined an extensive grading rubric detailed below which is manually reviewed to ensure the information we gather is as accurate as humanly possible.

The company's score that you see displayed on a company report page is a score ranging from zero to five (including decimals), with zero meaning zero influence that a foreign adversary has over a company to five meaning a foreign adversary has full control over a company. It is possible for a score to reach over five for several reasons, including the possibility of a company being controlled by two or more foreign adversaries. The score is calculated via the following step-by-step process by our reviewers:

Step 1: Examine DEF-14A for the given company

1. a. Look at the beneficial owners table for each beneficial owner. For each beneficial owner, we assert the following:
2. i. If the beneficial owner is a company, then check to see if they have a score and use that score. If not, repeat the above process for that company to obtain a score.

Step 2: Check Each Major Beneficial Owner

1. a. Once the score is calculated for each beneficial owner, check each owner to see if they own at least 20% of the company. According to most recent legislation as of April 24th, 2024 (H.R.7521 - Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act), having at least 20% foreign ownership is an issue for a company to be controlled by a foreign influence and thus not good for our standards. If the beneficial owner has at least 20% ownership, take a look at their score.
2. i. If the score is zero, skip ahead to the next company.
3. ii. If the score is between one and two, then the company will get scored a one. Every consecutive offending beneficial owner will increase that score by 0.25.
4. iii. If the score is between three and four, then the company will get scored a three. Every consecutive offending beneficial owner will increase that score by 0.5.
5. iv. If the score is between four and five, then the company will get scored a five which indicates a risk. Every consecutive offending beneficial owner will increase that score by one.

Step 3: Check Remaining Beneficial Owners

1. a. For the remaining beneficial owners with less than 20% ownership, we then add the influence of all sub-20% shareholders together and continue assessments like Step 2. We can consider this as the "residual beneficial owners".
2. i. If the sum is less than 20%, then set a score for the residual beneficial owners from zero to three based on scores of the major beneficial owners from Step 2. This would mean that a three indicates nearly all major beneficial owners received a five on their risk score, while a zero would indicate very few beneficial owners went higher than a zero score.
3. ii. If the sum is greater or equal to 20%, then we treat this as a singular entity and evaluate it as we would a major beneficial owner from Step 2. In addition, we would also take into account the scores of the other major beneficial owners as we did above, but this time on a scale of zero to five. Similar to the above step, a five would indicate nearly all major beneficial owners received a five on their risk score, while a zero would indicate very few beneficial owners went higher than a zero score.

These individual scores are then combined to produce a result for the calculated risk scores seen on a company result page.