Monthly Archives: February 2016

DARPA STAC: Challenge-driven Cybersecurity Research

Last week I attended a multi-day meeting for the DARPA STAC program; I am the PI of a UMD-led team. STAC supports research to develop “Space/time Analysis for Cybersecurity.” More precisely, the goal is to develop tools that can analyze software to find exploitable side channels or denial-of-service attacks involving space usage or running time.

In general, DARPA programs focus on a very specific problem, and so are different from the NSF style of funded research that I’m used to, in which the problem, solution, and evaluation approach are proposed by each investigator. One of STAC’s noteworthy features is its use of engagements, during which research teams use their tools to find vulnerabilities in challenge problems produced by an independent red team. Our first engagement was last week, and I found the experience very compelling. I think that both the NSF style and the DARPA style have benefits, and it’s great that both styles are available.

This post talks about my experience with STAC so far. I discuss the interesting PL research challenges the program presents, the use of engagements, and the opportunities STAC’s organizational structure offers, when done right.

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Filed under Process, Program Analysis, Research, Science, Software Security

Software Security Ideas Ahead of Their Time

[This post was conceived and co-authored by Andrew Ruef, Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, working with me. –Mike]

As researchers, we are often asked to look into a crystal ball. We try to anticipate future problems so that work we begin now will help address those problems before they become acute. Sometimes, a researcher guesses the problem and its possible solution, but chooses not to pursue it. In a sense, she has found, and discarded, an idea ahead of its time.

Recently, a friend of Andrew’s pointed him to a 20-year-old email exchange on the “firewalls” mailing list that blithely suggests, and discards, problems and solutions that are now quite relevant, and on the cutting edge of software security research. The situation is both entertaining and instructive, especially in that the ideas are quite squarely in the domain of programming languages research, but were not considered by PL researchers at the time (as far as we know).

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Filed under PL in practice, Research, Research directions, Software Security