BAE Systems has been awarded a £4.8 million contract by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop tools aimed at improving the security and reliability of software systems used by the Department of Defense (DoD).
The contract is part of DARPA’s Pipelined Reasoning of Verifiers Enabling Robust Systems (PROVERS) programme, designed to enhance the accessibility and scalability of software verification methods.
The effort seeks to address longstanding challenges with formal methods tools, which use mathematical proofs to ensure software properties are reliable and secure. While effective, these tools are often complex, time-intensive, and require expert knowledge. They also need significant rewriting each time code or system specifications change, limiting their scalability in real-world defence applications.
Daniel Mitchell, technical manager at BAE Systems, highlighted the potential impact of the programme:
“Engineering practices for software-reliant systems continuously evolve, and so too must the assurance techniques that confirm systems’ correctness and security. With PROVERS, proof engineering will create higher levels of assurance – helping critical Department of Defense software systems remain free of certain defects and vulnerabilities.”
The PROVERS programme, say BAE, aims to make formal verification methods more accessible to traditional software developers and systems engineers, integrating them seamlessly into existing processes. Under the contract, BAE Systems will demonstrate how these tools can be applied to DoD systems and provide feedback to developers on improving their usability and relevance for defence applications.
The work will be carried out at BAE Systems’ facilities in Merrimack, New Hampshire; Burlington, Massachusetts; and Arlington, Virginia.
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