Galois Secures Contract to Support DARPA’s Safe Documents Program

Galois has received a $4.6 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to carry out the third phase of the Safe Documents program. The company will work with Real-Time Innovations and Verocel to craft a novel code generator for the Data Distribution Service standard interface description language that would enable the automatic creation of safe parsers and unparsers while users write formats.

Developers aim to ensure that the tool is qualified to guarantee that the code it generates is secure.

According to Mike Dodds, principal scientist at Galois, the objective is to create future-proof systems that allow the development of secure parsers to be more widely accessible.

Paul Pazandak, RTI’s research director, explained that a DDS code generator would reduce system deployment times and make system certification more affordable.

Industries that could make use of the tool include the defense, aerospace, automotive and energy sectors, Galois said Friday.

SafeDocs is a DARPA initiative intended to enhance the detection of malicious data in electronic documents such as Personal Document Formats and facilitate the conversion of unsafe file formats.

Another organization supporting SafeDocs is BAE Systems’ FAST Labs, which has progressed to the program’s third phase. FAST Labs has built a suite of tools that apply a language-theoretic security approach to format security; it is meant to optimize parsers that catch malware hidden in files such as PDFs and image data.