In a broad agency announcement published last week, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) informed researchers that it is looking for innovative proposals in the area of software obfuscation.
Obfuscation is highly important in software development because it allows developers to distribute their programs while making sure that the source code can’t be viewed.
For the project dubbed “SafeWare” DARPA is seeking innovative approaches in the development of new mathematical foundations and implementation paths for provably-secure software obfuscation. The agency has highlighted that research primarily resulting in “evolutionary improvements” to existing methods will not be taken into consideration.
“The goal of the SafeWare research effort is to drive fundamental advances in the theory of program obfuscation and to develop highly efficient and widely applicable program obfuscation methods with mathematically proven security properties,” DARPA said.
SafeWare focuses on a total of four distinct technical areas (TAs): Mathematical Foundations of Program Obfuscation (TA1), Implementation of Program Obfuscation (TA2), Proof-of-Principle Demonstrations (TA3), and Testing, Evaluation and Research Integration (TA4). DARPA anticipates awarding one or more grants for the TAs 1-3, and one for T4.
The agency has pointed out that each proposal must target only one TA. Those interested in more than one area must submit multiple proposals, one for each TA.
The proposed method must meet certain conditions, including the requirement that a successful de-obfuscation attack can only be carried out by solving a computationally hard mathematical problem, not losing its effectiveness if it’s fully understood by an adversary, general purpose applicability to standard program types, and it must not be dependent of special hardware or other physical resources.
Selected researchers will be required to deliver technical papers and reports, computer code and pseudocode (only for TA2 and TA3), summaries of relevant program obfuscation research (only for TA4), slide presentations, quarterly progress reports, and a final report that summarizes the overall project.
The closing date for applications is November 18. Additional information on SafeWare is available in the broad agency announcement published on the Federal Business Opportunities (FBO) website.