Riverside Research and Anduril Industries announced a new collaboration to apply the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s formal methods technologies to strengthen cybersecurity for Anduril’s Lattice software platform and other mission-critical systems.
The effort aims to permanently eliminate certain cyber vulnerabilities at the tactical edge, helping ensure national security agencies and warfighters have secure, reliable systems to support mission success.
Formal methods are mathematically rigorous techniques used to specify, develop, analyze and verify software and hardware. More specifically, they mathematically prove code is incorruptible and will only behave as designed, systematically eliminating a class of vulnerabilities that could otherwise be exploited when systems connect to adversary networks.
Rob Denz, vice president of the Open Innovation Center at Riverside Research, said the company is committed to advancing formal methods research that improves software quality by identifying and eliminating ambiguities and errors early in the development process, when fixes are less costly.
“However, the critical measure of success for our company is to transition our research to operational users to solve real problems, secure parsing technologies are but one example of our success in this mission,” he added.
Riverside Research is using DARPA’s formal methods tools and methodology to develop secure parser technology. Through its collaboration with Anduril, the team will create formal methods-based processes that Anduril will apply to key software subcomponents used across multiple products. Anduril plans to expand the approach to other systems—both deployed and in development—that support national security agencies and warfighters.
Gokul Subramanian, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, said securing software-defined systems against cyberattacks is essential to ensuring warfighters can rely on those systems to carry out their missions.
“By combining DARPA’s advances in formal methods, Riverside Research’s proven secure parser technology, and Anduril’s software-defined, hardware-enabled capabilities, we are pioneering efforts within the defense industrial base to permanently eliminate cyber vulnerabilities at the tactical edge,” he said. “Together, we hope to spur widespread adoption of formal methods across all systems within the Department of Defense.”