Technologies for Trustworthy Computing and Information

In the world of network cyber security, the weak link is often not the hardware or the software, but the user. Passwords are often easily guessed or possibly written down, leaving entire networks vulnerable to attack. Mobile devices containing sensitive information are often lost or stolen, leaving a password as the single layer of defense.

Ever more sophisticated cyber attacks exploit software vulnerabilities in the Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) IT systems and applications upon which military, government and commercial organizations rely. The most rigorous way to thwart these attacks is formal verification, an analysis process that helps ensure that software is free from exploitable flaws and vulnerabilities. Traditional formal methods, however, require specially trained engineers to manually scour software—a process that up to now has been too slow and costly to apply beyond small software components.

During the past decade information technologies have driven the productivity gains essential to U.S. economic competitiveness, and computing systems now control significant elements of critical national infrastructure. As a result, tremendous resources are devoted to ensuring that programs are correct, especially at scale. Unfortunately, in spite of developers’ best efforts, software errors are at the root of most execution errors and security vulnerabilities.

See that black speck on the Lincoln’s penny-minted nostril? And on the right, notice another three of those specks comfortably framed by the eye of a needle? Those semiconductor chiplets, or “dielets” as DARPA Program Manager Kerry Bernstein calls them, could become Lilliputian electronic tamper-watching sentinels affixed to virtually every chip built into commercial and military systems.

The current standard method for validating a user’s identity for authentication on an information system requires humans to do something that is inherently unnatural: create, remember, and manage long, complex passwords. Moreover, as long as the session remains active, typical systems incorporate no mechanisms to verify that the user originally authenticated is the user still in control of the keyboard. Thus unauthorized individuals may improperly obtain extended access to information system resources if a password is compromised or if a user does not exercise adequate vigilance after initially authenticating at the console.