The synthesizer generator is a well-known and highly successful prototype system for automating the implementation of language-based software environments. it is currently licensed for research purposes to over 230 sites worldwide, including numerous dod contracts and laboratories, where it is being… More

Formal methods offer great promise for the elimination of errors in software, but before they can be widely adopted in industry, they must be supported by good tools readily acceptable to professional programmers. Existing formal-methods tools are hobbled by (1) weak user-interfaces, and (2)… More

The proposal presents a plan for creating a set of high-quality, language-independent, reusable components for extracting and operating on a program's semantic structure. Theses components will enable sophisticated and accurate analysis because semantic structures come much closer than syntactic… More

Current state-of-the-art technology for specifying and enforcing security policies for software is generally too inflexible, coarse-grained, and difficult to use. In systems that make use of mobile code, such as Java applets, the situation is yet more difficult. A more flexible and powerful approach… More

The problem of detecting malicious code has focused until now on techniques that search a program's surface structure representations to find locations where suspicious constructs occur. Such techniques are fundamentally weaker than methods that operateon representations that capture a program's… More

Real-time embedded systems are becoming increasingly complex and safety critical. In order to satisfy the complexity and safety requirements developers need tools and methodologies that support rigorous and complete specification capabilities, robustautomated translation from design to… More

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project from GrammaTech aims to conduct research that will address fundamental problems facing developers of the software systems that comprise the Internet. Problems with Internet systems such as software faults, security vulnerabilities and… More

We propose the commercial development of a new data structure thatwill be a plug-compatible replacement for binary-decision diagrams(BDDs). BDDs have proven to be extremely useful across a wide rangeof software applications. For example, they are essential in manyhardware design automation tasks,… More

Embedded systems software is being used for increasingly complex and safety-critical applications. In order to ensure the safe and successful operation of these applications we must verify their safety and mission critical properties, and reduce relianceon a testing process that can only detect the… More

Current state-of-the-art technology for specifying and enforcing security policies for software is generally too inflexible, coarse-grained, and difficult to use. In systems that make use of mobile code, such as Java applets, the situation is yet more difficult. A more flexible and powerful approach… More

"Malicious code is code that has been intentionally added to or changed in a software system with the intention of causing harm, or subverting the intended function of the system. Most digital electronic equipment is controlled by firmware. Firmwarepresents a tempting target to an attacker because… More

"The problem of information security has become critical because of the growing dependence of the economy and the armed forces on complex networked information systems. Of particular concern are security vulnerabilities that are caused by programmingerrors. We plan to study the feasibility and… More

Differentiation is the single most important numerical operation inscientific computing. Creating derivative functions manually or byusing finite differencing is error-prone, time-consuming andpotentially inaccurate. Automatic differentiation (AD) holds great promisefor overcoming these problems,… More

"The security and prosperity of the nation has become increasingly dependent on complex software systems. Unfortunately, current practice usually yields software that is generally unreliable and insecure. The industry must reduce reliance on methods thatcan only detect the presence of faults, and… More

"The problem of supporting millions of lines of Ada code is of critical importance to the DoD and the missile defense community. The decline in the use of Ada has led to a fall in the supply of trained personnel, and a reduction in vendor tool support. Asmigration to a new language is usually… More

We propose the development of software technology for the interactive incremental conversion of legacy code to other languages. The goal is to make it cost-effective to migrate code from one language to another. The technology will allow a user to first transform the code to make it amenable to… More

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will conduct research to design a system for the unit testing of modules. This system will operate by automatically capturing events at the boundary of the module under test while a client of the module executes test cases. These events will be… More

Buffer-overrun vulnerabilities in programs are responsible for a huge percentage of security breaches worldwide. The widespread use of dynamic testing tools to detect these vulnerabilities has failed to halt or prevent the problem. We propose thedevelopment of a semi-automatic tool for detecting… More

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project aims to make it much easier to create unit-level regression tests for Java programs. Their benefits are clear, but existing techniques for creating them are flawed because they are difficult to apply to existing code, and tool support… More

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project aims to make it much easier to create unit-level regression tests for Java programs. Their benefits are clear, but existing techniques for creating them are flawed because they are difficult to apply to existing code, and tool support… More

Software continues to be deployed with large numbers of flaws. Existing approaches for detecting flaws in software are mostly dynamic: they rely on the executing the software on a particular set of inputs. In contrast, static approaches consider allpossible executions of the program. Static… More

Existing software systems face the threat of reverse engineering. Given enough time and resources, a determined hacker can recover the design of a software program by examining its binary. The consequences of this can be dramatic: the hacker may gainunauthorized access to sensitive computer systems,… More

The problem of supporting millions of lines of Ada code is of critical importance to the DoD and the missile defense community. The decline in the use of Ada has led to a fall in the supply of trained personnel, and a reduction in tool vendor support. Migration to a new language is usually… More

Toolkits for Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used in government and industry. If such systems have access to sensitive information, it is important to know their security properties. A toolkit may contain low-level flaws, such as buffer-overrun errors that allow an attacker to… More

Existing software systems face the threat of reverse engineering. Given enough time and resources, a determined hacker can recover the design of a software program by examining its binary. The consequences of this can be dramatic: the hacker may gain unauthorized access to sensitive computer… More

As hardware platforms age, manufacturers are less willing to support them and related technologies. Legacy weapons systems must eventually be modernized. Re-implementation of the legacy software by hand is prohibitively expensive. A system is needed for automatically translating software written… More

The semantic web is a worldwide effort aimed at attaching machine-understandable semantic information to content, and to develop applications that make use of that information. SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) is a logic programming language that is becoming a standard for providing reasoning… More

Adversaries reverse engineer weapons systems to replicate a system's advanced capabilities or discover its weaknesses. The software in advanced civilian products is similarly reverse engineered by competitors. Many of these critical systems are real-time systems. The restrictions of real-time have… More

As hardware platforms age, manufacturers are less willing to support them and related technologies. Legacy weapons systems must eventually be modernized. Re-implementation of the legacy software by hand is prohibitively expensive. A system is needed for automatically translating software written in… More

The problem of supporting large mixed-language software systems is of great importance to the Navy and beyond. Often the only reliable source of information about their architecture is the source code itself. Having a reliable way to automatically create visualizations of the architecture is… More

The goal of this proposal is to advance the state-of-the-art in malware detectors, and thereby offer protection against next-generation malicious code. Currently, malware detectors - in the form of commercial virus scanners - are an important component in the defense of computer systems. We propose… More

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate a new approach to hardening programs against attack. The defense mechanism works by controlling how a process can interact with its environment, making it exceedingly difficult for an attacker to commandeer a system and… More

Development of modern software applications involves the use (or reuse) of a large number of software components from many different developers - some of whom may be unknown, untrustworthy, or even hostile parties. A comprehensive approach is needed for identifying malicious and unauthorized code in… More

We propose to develop a trace-based disassembler and integrate it with our break-through binary analysis tool, CodeSurfer/x86. A trace-based disassembler builds a trace of the instruction sequence that is executed at run time (during one or more runs of the program). The trace is analyzed to… More

Malicious logic may be intentionally inserted into software as is the case with insider attack, or innocent mistakes may open vulnerabilities to worms and the like. We propose a double edged approach to inserting monitoring logic for machine code on all operating systems in order to ensure that:… More

Adversaries reverse engineer weapons systems to replicate a system's advanced capabilities or discover its weaknesses. The software in advanced civilian products is similarly reverse engineered by competitors. Many of these critical systems are real-time systems. The restrictions of real-time have… More

Adversaries reverse engineer weapons systems to replicate a system's advanced capabilities or discover its weaknesses. Many of these critical systems are real-time systems. The restrictions of real-time have a significant impact on the implementation of anti-tamper technology. This work will build… More

Large software systems typically comprise many components written in many different languages that communicate through complex interfaces. The code base will consist of a mixture of source code, configuration files, test vectors and other artifacts. Tools are needed to help software engineers… More

Modern software projects are extremely complex systems. A small subprogram may require intense study to understand its intended functionality, yet even modest software applications have thousands of such subprograms. Assessing software quality is critical, but an engineer tasked with analyzing or… More

We propose a deobfuscation tool that uses machine-code analysis to expose self-protecting malware for further analysis (e.g., by an automated malware detector, or a human analyst) using dynamic disassembly techniques. The proposed deobfuscator will also be capable of checking that the… More

Malicious code causes huge economic damage every year. As critical infrastructure increases its dependence on networked information systems, the potential damage from malicious becomes more acute. Identifying and neutralising such code is especially difficult when executables are defended against… More

The problem of malicious code inserted by a hostile inside attacker is of increasing concern to the government. The most efficient time to detect such code is during development. This is currently very difficult as malicious code can often be disguised as an innocent error, and because much code… More

The problem of finding flaws in large complex software systems is acute and getting worse because many systems are employing new cognitive techniques to increase their capabilities. Such techniques are typically highly dynamic and concurrent, which increases the complexity of the system and makes… More

Defense research and development is increasingly using software to perform critical roles. It is important that these assests be protected. Great progress has been made in providing in-band protection of software, including on-going work at GrammaTech. However, strong protection requires defensive… More

The protection of intellectual property is a key problem being addressed both in public and private research. However, even with the amount of resources given to further research into the state-of-the-art, existing technologies are far short of being sufficiently protected against reverse… More

Distributing applications across networks brings both new power and new risks. Mission-critical applications are increasingly spread over national or global networks to enable information gathering and sharing on an unprecedented scale. The Global Information Grid envisions diverse end-to-end… More

The victor in a conflict is often the party that can gain the "upper hand". In the battle between software protection and reverse engineering, however, the victor is the party that gains the "lower hand". We propose a novel software protection system based on hypervisors that gives the advantage… More

The goal of this project is to develop a static analysis tool that identifies program flaws that may arise when executing on a multi-core processor. In particular, we will target flaws that arise in lock-free algorithms. Concurrent programs are often plagued by race conditions on shared data.… More

Validating software is a critical step in developing high confidence systems. Typical software development practices are not acceptable in systems where failure leads to loss of life or other high costs. New software development tools are needed to radically reduce defect rates and enable the high… More

Reliability is a crucial characteristic in safety-critical systems, yet it can only be measured late in the software development process when changes are difficult and costly. We propose a framework for estimating the risk of software that can be applied early in the software development… More

Recently, there has been an increase in the use of anti-tamper techniques (e.g., obfuscation) in all types of software. However, applying anti-tamper techniques is technically challenging, and when applied to large, sophisticated software, there is a danger of introducing subtle bugs, or not… More

A number of software defenses exist that frustrate attempts to examine or tamper with a protected application. However, attackers are unlikely to approach the defenses head-on. One weak point is during installation and deployment of defenses. There is sort of a "who came first" game played between… More

Global networks bring both new power and new risks. Mission-critical applications are increasingly spread over national or global networks to enable information gathering and sharing on an unprecedented scale. While this large-scale information sharing promises new efficiencies, each endpoint in a… More

Validating software is a critical step in developing high confidence systems. Typical software development practices are not acceptable in systems where failure leads to loss of life or other high costs. Software best practices for high confidence systems are often codified as coding rules.… More

Development and maintenance of large software systems is a daunting task. A number of tools for simplifying the development process have been designed over the years. These include source-code browsers, debuggers, and profilers. However, despite all of these tools, software has become increasingly… More

Hypervisors offer a virtualization platform that is cost effective and attractive from a security point of view because guest operating systems are independent of each other. However, these claims of independence must be certified before it is permitted to use a hypervisor in a security-critical… More

Hypervisors offer a virtualization platform that is cost effective and attractive from a security point of view because guest operating systems are independent of each other. However, these claims of independence must be certified before it is permitted to use a hypervisor in a security-critical… More

The current generation of advanced static-analysis tools find vulnerabilities by exploring all possible executions of a program as configured for a single platform. The next quantum leap in capability will be a system that will explore all executions for many different platforms simultaneously. We… More

We propose to build a system that combines novel automatic test generation techniques with state-of-the-art multi-platform continuous integration technology. The proposed system will automatically generate test data by using a combination of symbolic and concrete executions to intelligently explore… More

New vulnerabilities and attacks on software applications and the underlying systems are discovered daily. Most security research focuses on detection of attacks--typically, by monitoring the execution of an application and detecting anomalous behavior. Little attention has been paid to how an… More

System reliability is a fundamental requirement for safety-critical weapons systems. A key challenge is identifying reliability problems early so that they can be fixed quickly and cheaply. Reliability problems are often integration problems: integration often reveals that flaws that seemed minor in… More

Software is rarely written entirely from scratch. Typically, third-party commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components are integrated into larger software systems used both in the commercial sector and in critical infrastructure. Third-party components often come in binary form, e.g., as dynamically… More

Insider threat has been an increasingly important problem given low employee morale in todayf?Ts tight economy and the increasing reliance on third-party software (including COTS components) that are generally only available in machine-code form and are in many cases produced oversees. We believe… More

We propose to introduce artificial diversity to each installation of a standard platform by running the system using a combination of hardware virtualization and software dynamic translation. Automatic, transparent diversification offers powerful protection for systems that would otherwise remain… More

A reverse engineer who has the ability to examine software in an off-line lab has an enormous advantage over one who is forced to work f?oin the fieldf??. In contrast to the softwaref?Ts intended environment, a reverse engineer can work undetected, and can more easily make use of analysis tools such… More

Multi-core architectures, which recently have become pervasive, exposed the software-engineering community to a host of challenges. Applications that want to take a full advantage of a multi-core processor must be explicitly parallelizeda process that is hard and error prone. Additionally, the… More

A number of software defenses exist that frustrate attempts to examine or tamper with a protected application. However, if an attacker arrives before these defenses are initialized, then they can observe the defenses as they are setup, gaining great insight into how the protections can be subverted.… More

Complex software is notoriously opaque. This opacity is costly for software engineers who must make pivotal design decisions without knowing the tradeoffs and consequences of those decisions. We propose a visualization tool that combines powerful document and software analysis techniques with rich… More

The current generation of advanced static-analysis tools find vulnerabilities by exploring all possible executions of a program as configured for a single platform. Phase I research confirmed that a significant number of platform-specific defects may be missed if analysis is restricted to a single… More

System reliability is a fundamental requirement for safety-critical weapons systems. A key challenge is identifying reliability problems early so that they can be fixed quickly and cheaply. Reliability problems are often integration problems: integration often reveals that flaws that seemed minor in… More

The proposed project will develop a new technique for invariant inference and embed this and other current invariant inference and checking techniques in an easy-to-use tool. The result will enhance an engineer's ability to use formal methodsÂ? generating, editing, reviewing, proving and… More

Modern software typically integrates a number of third-party commercial components. The indiscriminate use of such components poses significant security threats to software systems because the components may harbor unintentional vulnerabilities as well as intentionally malicious behaviors. Moreover,… More

Physically Unclonable Devices (PUFs) have many applications in security and digital rights management. These devices are used in creation of random number generators used to seed key generation and one-time pad construction for encryption applications. They are also used as a means of uniquely… More

The cost and timeliness of weapons-software deployment may benefit from including shareware, freeware, open-source, and COTS components. However, Air Force"s critical, safety-of-flight, and sensitive-data applications require higher assurance than that provided by commercial components. To make… More

Modern computer systems involve complex arrangements of many software components. It has proven difficult to secure such systems from attack by finding and closing all security holes. Dynamic monitoring techniques that detect intrusions have been developed to defend against latent, unknown… More

ABSTRACT: We propose to introduce artificial diversity to each installation of a standard platform by running the system using a combination of hardware virtualization and software dynamic translation. Automatic, transparent diversification offers powerful protection for systems that would… More

Most large pieces of software are sufficiently complex that no individual completely understands all of its subparts. In order to make progress, programmers must operate in this environment of incomplete information. In many cases, programmers make poor design and implementation decisions because of… More

We propose technology to automatically detect software exploits that hijack the execution of a running Linux kernel or one of its hosted applications. The key enabling technology for the proposed work is provided by KATE, the Kernel Analysis and Translation Engine. KATE uses a combination of… More

ABSTRACT: The Air Force, other government organizations, and security-critical software development companies could be more cost-effective by using COTS and open-source software in their information and weapons systems. However, these software sources have significant safety and security risks; the… More

Modern software development has introduced a wide variety of functionality in modular chunks that can be rapidly reconfigured to create new applications. This leads to large, complex systems that, while providing the desired capabilities, may also include non-obvious and undesirable behavior. Such… More