GrammaTech Featured in Cyber Security Forum Initiative (CSFI) Podcast

by GrammaTech Research on August 31, 2020

csfi-blog

GrammaTech is a new gold sponsor of the Cyber Security Forum Initiative (CSFI), a non-profit organization with a mission “to provide Cyber Warfare awareness, guidance, and security solutions through collaboration, education, volunteer work, and training to assist the US Government, US Military, Commercial Interests, and International Partners.” CSFI is comprised of a large community of nearly 121,000 cybersecurity professionals from the government, military, private sector, and academia.

The CSFI Spotlight program recently interviewed Jason Spezzano, Senior Director of Cybersecurity at Grammatech, and Alexey Loginov, VP of Research at GrammaTech. In this discussion, GrammaTech had the opportunity to share our views and provide granular details of how our commercial solutions can meet the requirements of our US military, the Intelligence Community, and industry.

Sponsorships Available

In addition to the interview above, here are some examples of the research projects recently completed for U.S. government agencies highlighting our research areas and achievements, illustrative of what GrammaTech brings to an organization like CSFI and its members:

Air Force Research Laboratory

Deep Static Analysis – Software Binaries: Our work addresses the problem of finding bugs and security vulnerabilities in programs when source code is unavailable. Our goal is to create a platform that carries out static analysis on executables and provides information that an analyst can use to understand the workings of potentially malicious code, such as COTS components, plug-ins, mobile code, and DLLs, as well as memory snapshots of worms and virus-infected code. This work was expanded and later commercialized in our product CodeSonar for Binaries.

DARPA

Bug Injector: Injecting Vulnerabilities for Configurable Cyber Defense: GrammaTech is working on BUG-INJECTOR, a tool for generating cyber defense evaluation benchmarks. BUG-INJECTOR works by injecting vulnerabilities into existing software. BUG-INJECTOR is highly configurable, providing users the transparency required of a tool used to compare commercial products and perform security audits, and the customizability to enable focused evaluation of specific defensive tools, host programs, domains, classes of vulnerabilities, and even specific vulnerabilities. BUG-INJECTOR is implemented independent of leading cyber-defensive techniques, thus avoiding the circularity in which technical shortcomings limit the generated benchmark used to evaluate those very same techniques resulting in a false sense of security.

A Tool like BUG-INJECTOR which automates benchmark construction will permit more thorough and customized evaluation of commercial products and research results at lower cost.

BUG-INJECTOR injects bugs into dynamic traces. A “guess and check” heuristic evolutionary search allows BUG-INJECTOR to “get ahead” of existing and future cyber-defensive tools (i.e., inject bugs into concretely observed states which may be difficult to predict abstractly), ensuring the injected bugs are *independent* of leading cyber-defensive techniques, and resulting in a proof of vulnerability (PoV) (i.e., the input which caused the dynamic trace) for each injected vulnerability.

Office of Naval Research

Late-stage Software Customization and Complexity Reduction for Legacy Naval Systems: The goal of GrammaTech’s contribution to the overall Navy program is to advance the field of transforming existing software applications so that they are tailored for specific new situations. The tailoring produces simplified programs that are safer, more secure, and more efficient. GrammaTech’s approach automates the removal of irrelevant layers of abstraction, indirection, and other inefficiencies that are introduced into applications because of modern software-development practices. It also removes program features and options unneeded in the specific setting where the transformed program is to run that if left in the program only make it less safe, less secure, and less efficient.

GrammaTech’s system is built from binary code transformation technologies. End users will be able to transform their critical applications to shrink the attack surface, improve performance, lower memory consumption, and reduce complexity—all without breaking the application or disrupting operations. This same technology can also be used to reduce the time between detecting a vulnerability and re-deployment of a repaired system.

For more information on our research projects please see our research summary web page. For more details on how GrammaTech helps software organizations tackle cybersecurity challenges see our cybersecurity solutions page, our various whitepapers and blogs on the topic. We look forward to working with CSFI and its members on furthering research and development in cybersecurity.