With threats from malicious cyber actors on the rise, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is aggressively leaning into developing frameworks around “formal methods” techniques to better protect warfighter systems, a DARPA official said on June 5.
The Defense Department (DoD) research and development agency has been working since at least last year on the use of formal methods – which it defines as “mathematically rigorous techniques” to “prove and provide continuous evidence” of correctness and security for software systems.
“For example, DARPA’s High Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) program demonstrated how these techniques could effectively secure Department of Defense (DOD) military systems,” the agency said in 2023.
Benjamin W. Bishop, deputy director of transition in DARPA’s Adaptive Capabilities Office, offered a positive report on the use of formal methods techniques at the C4ISRNET Conference on Wednesday.
He said the methods are “starting to show a great promise in increasing security and really increasing our effectiveness across the joint force.”
In addition to maintaining the integrity of technologies that help warfighters, he said the formal methods techniques can also lead to “frameworks that makes that easier to kind of navigate the acquisition process,” Bishop said.
One of the prime examples of DARPA’s successful utilization of formal method techniques is in the Constellation program. That program started out as a pilot project in 2022 between DARPA and U.S. Cyber Command, and the organizations recently established a new binding agreement to carry the program into the future.
They said last month that the Constellation program is focused on “creating an expedited pathway for delivering cyber technologies from the laboratory to the cyber battlefield.”
“It’s at DARPA, and it’s in the Information Innovation Office, and actually it’s a program with no technology. It’s actually a program to transmit other programs, specifically with U.S. Cyber Command,” Bishop said.
