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Overview
Technical Program
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Cyber Trust (CT)
Program Manager: Mr. Lee Badger
Challenges and Approach:
Cyber Trust is focused on three areas of information assurance:
- Verify the absence of security flaws in large applications: The goal here is to verify the absence of known classes of security flaws including user/kernel pointer errors, format string vulnerabilities, Unicode flaws, input validation, and buffer overrun flaws in millions of lines of code. Verifying the absence of flaws is a distinctly different and much more rigorous approach to software assurance than current approaches which merely attempt to find flaws with no assurance that more do not remain.
- Certify proof of correctness of devices or software from untrusted vendors: The approach to certifying the correctness of devices or software will leverage a new business model for acquisition between product buyer and untrusted product seller. The buyer communicates the desired system behavior to the seller via formal specification, the seller delivers the system with a proof script of correct system behavior, and the buyer then certifies the proof script with a trusted mechanized tool. Thus the ultimate objective is to produce a trusted mechanized reasoning system that is sufficiently powerful to enable the construction of proofs in a reasonable amount of time on industrial-sized problems.
- Develop a clean-slate secure computing architecture from the ground up, including microprocessor, operating system kernel, and network protocols: The goal here is to create a clean-slate architecture for building trustworthy computing systems. A microprocessor will be developed using security-aware Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), micro-architecture, an operating system (OS) kernel that makes use of the enhanced ISA and micro-architecture, and secure networking protocols. A reference system will be designed and implemented to support commercial adoption into next generation systems and classroom instruction.
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