DARPA has awarded a $3.7 million contract to Vencore Labs to keep hostile powers from reverse engineering captured software.
Under the contract, Vencore will “develop highly efficient and widely applicable program obfuscation methods with mathematically proven security properties,” said a company news release. “These techniques will make it more difficult for adversaries to reverse engineer software in captured equipment.”
Vencore will the prime in a team that includes the New Jersey Institute of Technology and BBN Technologies. The team will leverage its prior work on protocols for privacy-preserving computation and homomorphic encryption for DARPA’s Programming Computation on Encrypted Data (PROCEED) program, as well as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) Security and Privacy Assurance Research (SPAR) programs.
