Award Data

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) operates security screening for all air passengers of outgoing aircraft. The Air Carrier Access Act of 1986 (ACAA) ensured access to air travel for passengers with disabilities, including mandating equal or similar treatment in the screening process. This ACAA requirement comports with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) which prohibits discri ...

Transportation Safety Officers (TSOs) currently use a multi-step decision tree to screen and resolve an alarm of a suspicious object in crowded and high-throughput environments, such as aviation and security checkpoints. In high-throughput environments, this can lead to information overload and mental fatigue. Homeland Security desires a more capable integrated Alarm Resolution (AR) sensor suite, ...

The rapid detection of highly toxic compounds, such as chemical warfare agents, toxic industrial compounds, pharmaceutical-based agents, and non-traditional agents, is paramount to industrial and national security. While multiple chemical detection platforms exist, the ability to detect toxic compounds is fundamentally limited by the available reference database of known chemical signatures. Recen ...

Development of a reflection control and direction device (RCDD) is proposed. This innovative device will progress the state of the art for propulsion of solar sails used to fly space weather monitoring sensors to sub-LaGrange point orbits for earlier warning times of impending destructive space weather events. A reflection control device (RCD) utilizes polymer dispersed liquid crystal (PDLC) mater ...

Drought is responsible for $327.7B in economic loss since 1980 in the United States and typically precedes, cooccurs, or initiates other hazards like wildfires or prolonged periods of intense heat. The compounding or cascading of these hazards routinely threatens the wellbeing and stability of communities. The economic impact from drought can be especially harsh when the drought begins rapidly in ...

In the Phase I and II efforts on Galois' Attack Sensitive Brittle Software (Brittle) SBIR project, we implemented Software Fault Enhancement (SFE), a binary modification technique for improving the robustness of existing binary code, without requiring access to source code or other documentation.  This work is promising enough that the toolset is now being commercialized.  On this sequential Pha ...

The objective of this study will be to develop technologies for recompiling legacy binaries to the secure CHERI ISA in support of DoD modernization priorities. Doing this would enable upgrading DoD systems processors and software by ruling out several important categories of security vulnerability that are possible on legacy architectures. However, recompilation is inherently a very difficult task ...

The vision of the CAMDEN project has been to explore the use of mechanism design as a solution to effectively incentivize and accelerate collaboration in critical DoD domains. Our Phase II goal is to “make it real” by building one or more deployable mechanism design solutions, demonstrating in a very tangible way how mechanism design can benefit the DoD. In the 8-month Phase 1 effort, we aimed ...

Due to exponential growth in complexity, current hardware designs cannot be thoroughly tested, which leads to significant hardware vulnerabilities reaching the field. Recent innovations in Model-Based Engineering (MBE) provide information flow analysis results that can be used to drive design state space partitioning – separating the design into multiple, individually verifiable portions – bas ...

The Generating Requirements Evidence with Analysis and System-level Enforcement (GREASE) project will develop a static binary verifier that generates evidence that COTS software components satisfy their requirements. The GREASE tool will accelerate both (1) the safe and high-assurance integration of COTS components into systems, and (2) the generation of assurance cases for the certification of sy ...