DARPA seeks to address electronic file vulnerabilities

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a contract to BAE Systems to develop cyber tools preventing electronic file vulnerabilities that could potentially lead to cyberattacks.

The development initiative would be part of DARPA’s Safe Documents (SafeDocs) program, which seeks to effectively identify and reject malicious data in a variety of electronic formats.

“Research on the SafeDocs program will leverage BAE Systems’ expertise in cyber, algorithmic, and systems engineering domains to give developers tools that currently don’t exist in government or commercial markets to more easily and efficiently ensure the security of electronic documents,” Anne Taylor, product line director of the Cyber Technology group at BAE Systems, said. “As the creation and use of electronic documents continues to grow every day, so does the risk for potential cyberattacks, making it essential we create solutions that are built with security in mind to help keep content safe.”

The scope of work, per officials, includes the BAE Systems’ FAST Labs research and development team creating two different cyber tools, with the first tool seeking to recover, simplify and automatically select safe feature subsets within electronic data formats to help encode the data safely and unambiguously.

The second effort involves a toolkit to help software developers avoid vulnerabilities in the software they create to process complex electronic data.