DARPA convenes colloquium to advance rigorous cybersecurity techniques
NewsJune 26, 2025

ARLINGTON, Va. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) recently held its Resilient Software Systems Colloquium, during which more than 300 participants from across the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), defense industry, U.S. government, allies, academia, and formal-methods developers convened as part of DARPA's goal to catalyze widespread adoption of formal methods, mathematically rigorous techniques that can dramatically improve the security and reliability of software systems.
According to DARPA's account of the meeting, over the last decade, DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), which hosted the colloquium, developed scalable tools based on formal methods to secure and prove the absence of exploitable vulnerabilities.
Speakers at the colloquium represented a variety of perspectives from organizations using formal methods today, such as Amazon Web Services, Sandia National Laboratories, and the U.S. Air Force; there were also demonstrations from formal methods developers in hopes of attracting new users from the defense industry.
“Our goal is to flip a bit in every one of your minds,” said DARPA deputy director Rob McHenry. “It simply is no longer OK to accept the risk of cyber-vulnerabilities. We know how to do better. We all must do better. Today is the last day of the cyber-vulnerability era.”
I2O Director Kathleen Fisher announced the Resilient Software Systems Accelerator at the event, which the agency said will provide seed funding to defense industrial base companies to partner with formal-methods tool developers to apply formal-methods tools, measure the impact of those tools, and then assess the level of effort to integrate them.
“We are not asking people to adopt bleeding-edge technology,” said Fisher. “We're asking people to adopt tried-and-true technology that is ready for widespread adoption.”
DARPA has made the colloquium available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/@DARPAtv/videos.