GrammaTech improves U.S. Navy software security

Misbehaving software is not characterized by a universal pattern, which makes it difficult to actively monitor systems to detect breaches and respond to them. As part of this new U.S. Navy project, ammaTech researchers will use a combination of automatic programme analysis and manual tuning techniques to develop a tool for creating a model of a system’s intended behaviour. This software modelling tool will capture the most important properties of the system’s intended behaviour and determining what low level events must be tracked in order to observe the critical behaviour.

The development of this tool will provide security critical systems with an extra layer of protection against attacks. This includes attacks that don’t involve unusual system call activity. The technology will be immediately useful to branches of the government, financial institutions and any companies whose systems require strenuous security protection.

Tim Teitelbaum, CEO of GrammaTech, comments: “An important aspect of this tool is that it will be easy for developers to use. As the developer codes, the tool will capture his or her notion of what behaviour is expected by creating a model that specifies a boundary the application shouldn’t cross. Our runtime monitors will then look for any unexpected behaviour and take corrective action, even if the application has been compromised.”