DARPA Working on Provably Secure Embedded Software

  • 2 October 2014
  • 0 replies
  • 3 views

Userlevel 7
Badge +54
by Dennis Fisher    October 1, 2014
 
DARPA is the birthplace of the network that eventually became today’s Internet, and the agency has spent the decades since it released that baby out into the world trying to find new ways defend it.  That task has grown ever more complex and difficult, and now DARPA is working on a new kind of software that is provably secure for specific properties.

Arati Prabhakar, the director of DARPA, said that the agency, which performs advanced research and development for the United States military and government, has been working on the software in the hopes that it can run on some embedded systems. The software isn’t meant as a general purpose operating system for servers or desktops, but Prabhakar said that the agency believes it has plenty of applications.

“Unfortunately there’s not going to be a silver bullet. There are pieces of this we think can become tractable. One of our programs is working on software that’s unhackabale for specific security properties,” said Prabhakar, who was speaking at the Washington Post Cybersecurity Summit on Wednesday. “We’re working on a mathematical proof that the software can’t be hacked from the outside. It’s for embedded systems with a modest number of lines of code.”
 
Full Article

0 replies

Be the first to reply!

Reply