Federal agency name: defense advanced research projects agency (DARPA), defense sciences office (DSO) funding opportunity title: young faculty award (YFA) funding opportunity number:…

The Department of the Interior Departmental Offices Interior Business Center awarded a $500,000 cooperative agreement to the University of Florida Division of Sponsored Research on September 30, 2025, under the Research and Technology Development program (CFDA 12.910). The award funds research on incremental fuzzing techniques that leverage constraint-guided local scope fuzzing to enable scalable and precise binary reverse engineering, with an emphasis on malware reverse engineering. The research proposes to perform constraint-guided fuzzing in small scope and propagate inferred mutation recipes to global scope, addressing limitations in existing fuzzing approaches that do not leverage transformation semantics of input constraints. Performance occurs in Florida with a completion date of September 29, 2027. The cooperative agreement is structured to support innovative research approaches that enable revolutionary advances rather than evolutionary improvements to existing practice.

Federal agency name: defense advanced research projects agency (DARPA), defense sciences office (DSO) funding opportunity title: young faculty award (YFA) funding opportunity number: DARPARA2501CATALOG of federal domestic assistance (cfda) number(s): 12.910 research and technology developmentprogram description: DARPA is soliciting innovative research proposals in the areas of interest to the following DARPA technical offices: defense sciences office (DSO), information innovation office (I2O), microsystems technology office (MTO), and the tactical technology office (TTO). Further detail regarding the specific technical areas of interest can be found below under open office topics. Proposed research should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems. Specifically excluded is research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.motivation and overview of the research plan: this proposal involves investigation of incremental fuzzing techniques that leverage constraint guided local scope fuzzing to enable scalable and precise binary reverse engineering with an emphasis on malware reverse engineering. Fuzzing is a very precise software analysis technique, yet IT cannot be applied to arbitrary snippets of binary code as IT has been explored as a whole program analysis technique. Although grey-box fuzzing leverages various types of feedback to improve exploration of the input space, fuzzing takes very long to achieve the analysis goals while not providing any guarantees. Fuzzing is a very active research area with various enhancements. However, existing input space search and mutation approaches do not leverage the transformation semantics of input constraints. Since precise handling of input constraints do not scale, we propose to perform constraint-guided fuzzing in a small scope and propagate inferred mutation recipes to the global scope. The goal is to revolutionize malware reverse engineering by enabling formulation of reachability queries in a language with formal semantics and to solve such queries by utilizing fine-grained binary code fuzzing.