DARPA Launches Electronic Data Verification Program; Sergey Bratus Comments

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a program that aims to boost the detecting capabilities of software for untrustworthy data while protecting new and existing electronic data formats.

DARPA said Thursday the Safe Documents initiative intends to verify the credibility of electronic documents while developing safer subsets of malicious electronic formats.

Researchers involved in the program will create technologies that record human-intelligible, machine-readable descriptors of electronic data formats, as well as build kits to construct verified parsers or programs that shrink data inputs to accelerate the processing procedure.

SafeDocs will help reduce threats aimed at consumer, enterprise and critical infrastructure systems.

“With today’s online risk environment, allowing software to interact with untrusted electronic documents and messages is akin to downloading and running untrusted programs on your computer,” said SafeDocs Program Manager Sergey Bratus.

DARPA will hold a Proposers Day on Aug. 24 for parties interested in participating in SafeDocs.