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Software Protection through Autonomic Representation of Knowledge (SPARK)

Award Information
Agency: Department of Defense
Branch: Air Force
Contract: FA8650-11-C-1052
Agency Tracking Number: O2-0999
Amount: $749,740.00
Phase: Phase II
Program: SBIR
Solicitation Topic Code: OSD09-IA4
Solicitation Number: 2009.2
Timeline
Solicitation Year: 2009
Award Year: 2011
Award Start Date (Proposal Award Date): 2011-03-11
Award End Date (Contract End Date): N/A
Small Business Information
625 Mount Auburn Street
Cambridge, MA -
United States
DUNS: 115243701
HUBZone Owned: No
Woman Owned: No
Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No
Principal Investigator
 Catherine Call
 Senior Software Engineer
 (617) 491-3474
 ccall@cra.com
Business Contact
 Ninos Hanna
Title: Contract Specialist
Phone: (617) 491-3474
Email: nhanna@cra.com
Research Institution
 Stub
Abstract

Cyber warfare poses a critical threat to the security of our national and military interests via acts of piracy, theft, and reverse engineering. Today"s nation-state-class attacks are increasingly difficult to differentiate from normal operations and often take advantage of users"trust in a system"s operating environment, hardware, memory, and other attack vectors. To counter such novel attacks, software protection systems must move beyond traditional and defeatable solutions that rely on signatures and integrity checks. Such protection systems must provide a near-human ability to derive meaning and draw quantitative conclusions from system event data and must adopt a machine learning approach to improve their ability to detect, prevent, and remediate novel attacks with experience. To meet these requirements, we propose to develop a Software Protection through Autonomic Knowledge Representation (SPARK) system. Key features of our system include a natural language processing-based approach to knowledge construction and representation that provides both more expressiveness and greater flexibility than traditional attack modeling approaches, and a tiered approach to software protection that allows automated defense techniques to function autonomously while providing a fall-back to human involvement when previously unseen anomalous events are encountered.

* Information listed above is at the time of submission. *

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