The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected eight teams for a new program that aims to develop practical tools and approaches to anticipate and mitigate emergent behaviors of modern computer systems that can pose vulnerabilities to cyber attacks.
DARPA said Thursday the three-phase Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines program seeks to enhance security outcomes in software throughout the entire development life cycle by cutting cyberthreat actors’ access to exploitable system behaviors.
The selected teams are:
- Arizona State University
- Galois
- Kudu Dynamics
- Narf Industries
- River Loop Security
- Riverside Research Institute
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- WebSensing
HARDEN will run for four years and cover several major technical areas, including the development of tools designed to report emergent behaviors and create emergent execution models.
Northrop Grumman will evaluate the systems engineering and integration process of the program while Cromulence and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will test the effectiveness of the proposed mitigation techniques.