Software security contract signed between BAE Systems and DARPA
NewsDecember 05, 2024
MERRIMACK, NH. BAE Systems' FAST Labs research and development organization agreed to a $6 million contract with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of the DARPA Pipelined Reasoning of Verifiers Enabling Robust Systems (PROVERS) program, which is aimed at further securing software development across the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).
BAE Systems describes the current use of formal methods tools, a type of software verification, as enabling high levels of assurance through mathematical proofs that certain properties hold, but these can be time-consuming and difficult to learn and use. These proofs also need to be re-written at every code or specification change, which fails to scale.
The goal of the DARPA PROVERS program, according to the BAE Systems announcement, is to make formal methods accessible to non-experts -- inclukding traditional software developers and systems engineers -- while minimizing the impact on their existing processes and performance.
Under the terms of the contract, BAE Systems will produce a DoD-relevant system to demonstrate how formal methods tools can be integrated into the development and certification process and assure of correctness. BAE Systems software engineers will also provide feedback to developers on how to ensure formal methods tools are applicable to DoD systems and how to make those tools accessible to them.
Work on the PROVERS program will occur at BAE Systems’ facilities in Merrimack, New Hampshire; Burlington, Massachusetts; and Arlington, Virginia.
