DARPA-SN-20-55 V-SPELLS Proposers Day Announcement.pdf

Special Notice

VERIFIED SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF

LARGE LEGACY SOFTWARE (V-SPELLS)

Proposers Day

DARPA-SN-20-55

June 30, 2020

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 675 North Randolph Street Arlington, VA 22203-2114

DARPA-SN-20-55

DARPA Information Innovation Office

VERIFIED SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT OF LARGE

LEGACY SOFTWARE (V-SPELLS)

Proposers Day – July 29, 2020 Arlington, VA https://www.schafertmd.com/DARPA/I2O/V-SPELLS/PD/2020/July/

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O) is sponsoring a Proposers Day, to provide information to potential proposers on the objectives of the anticipated Verified Security and Performance Enhancement of Large Legacy Software (V-SPELLS) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA). When released, the BAA will be posted on the System for Award Management (SAM) website at https://beta.sam.gov/. This Proposers Day will be held at the unclassified level. There is no fee to attend. DARPA hosts Proposer Days to promote teaming arrangements between researchers, provide potential performers with information on whether and how they might respond to the Government's research and development solicitations, and to increase efficiency in proposal preparation and evaluation. Therefore, Proposer Days are open only to registered potential proposers.

This meeting is not open to the general public or members of the media.

The Proposers Day will be held on July 29, 2020, from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM (ET) via Webinar.

Advance registration is required. Note, all times listed in this announcement and on the registration website are Eastern Time. Attendance at the V-SPELLS Proposers Day is voluntary and is not required to propose to subsequent solicitations (if any) on this topic. The Proposers Day does not constitute a formal solicitation for proposals. This notification is issued solely for information and program planning purposes, and is not a Request for Information (RFI). Since this is not an RFI, no submissions against this notice will be accepted by DARPA. DARPA will not provide reimbursement for costs incurred to participate in this Proposers Day. Interested parties to this notice are cautioned that nothing herein obligates DARPA to issue a solicitation.

The Proposers Day will include overview presentations by DARPA personnel. There will be a Question & Answer session following the presentations. Additionally, in order to facilitate teaming discussions, proposers may indicate on the registration website that they authorize their contact information to be shared among meeting participants. Teaming will not be actively managed by DARPA.

Following the Proposers Day, DARPA anticipates posting additional information regarding the V- SPELLS program (e.g., DARPA materials presented at the Proposers Day and a Frequently Asked Questions [FAQ] document) to http://www.darpa.mil/policy/visitor-information.

https://beta.sam.gov/ http://www.darpa.mil/policy/visitor-information

SUMMARY

The United States Department of Defense has a critical need for enhancing and replacing components of existing software with more secure and more performant code. This includes cases where a key performance or security benefit comes from moving parts of the software to new hardware, such as utilizing hardware accelerators, isolation enclaves, offload processors, and distributed computation.

However, introducing enhancements or replacements into large legacy code bases carries a high risk that new code will not safely compose with the rest of the system. Verified programming methodologies for creating software that is correct-by-construction are currently not effective for lowering this risk, because they focus on clean-slate software construction, assume an existing formal specification that is typically not available for a legacy system, and require formal methods expertise typically not accessible to developers.

The goal of the V-SPELLS program is to create a developer-accessible capability for piece-by-piece enhancement of software components with new verified code that is both correct-by-construction and compatible-by-construction, i.e., safely composable with the rest of the system. V-SPELLS will create practical tools for developers to gain benefits of formal software verification in incremental software (re)engineering rather than only in clean-slate introduction. V-SPELLS tools will enable developers to deliver assured incremental modernization of legacy systems in a manner that leverages verification technologies and reduces rather than raises risk. V-SPELLS aims to radically broaden adoption of software verification by enabling incremental introduction of superior technologies into systems that cannot be re-designed from scratch and replaced as a whole.

To accomplish these goals, the V-SPELLS program will leverage a combination of novel concepts in program understanding and verification, as well as recent developments in domain specific languages and composable system architectures for production systems at scale. The program seeks breakthroughs in and novel approaches to the following technical challenges, including but not limited to:

• Automated program understanding to infer architectural structure, assumptions, and dependencies in a legacy source code base, enabling its decomposition into components with explicit modular structure, interfaces, dependencies, and constraints. Recovery of domain abstractions and models from legacy code bases, in succinct and expressive representations suitable for programming functional component enhancements or replacements that are safely composable with the existing systems.

• Matching known and extracted domain abstractions and models with legacy code, lifting of legacy code to succinct, enhanceable, safely composable, and inter-operating representations, and automated specification inference leveraging such representation. Provably safe composition of enhancements with the rest of the system.

• Overcoming performance reduction due to added layers of abstraction with novel verified cross-layer optimization and distribution techniques (“verified stack flattening and distribution”).

Development of non-brittle and granular rules for composable representation, packaging, and transformation of software verification proofs that support distribution and orchestration of verified programs.

PURPOSE

The purpose of the Proposers Day is to outline V-SPELLS technical goals and challenges, and to promote an understanding of the BAA proposal requirements. In addition, the Proposers Day will familiarize participants with DARPA’s interest in the area of software verification and assurance by enabling piecewise, compatible-by-construction enhancement of software components in legacy DoD systems, and creating methods and tools to recover succinct models of domain data abstractions and logic from the source code, adding enhancements to the models, and converting them to performant new component implementations verified to be compatible and secure.

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Participants must register in advance through the registration website. Registration is free but limited by the webinar capacity of 150 participants, so early registration is recommended. No more than three representatives per organization unit, and five people per overall organization, may attend this Proposers Day. Registrants are strongly encouraged to coordinate attendance internally within their organizations prior to registration.

Please register at https://www.schafertmd.com/DARPA/I2O/V-SPELLS/PD/2020/July/ no later than 5:00 PM (ET) July 22, 2020. Attendance is open to individuals who are U.S. citizens, U.S. permanent residents, and foreign nationals.

An online registration form and various other meeting details can be found at the registration website, https://www.schafertmd.com/DARPA/I2O/V-SPELLS/PD/2020/July/.

Any U.S. citizen wishing to attend, who has not pre-registered on V-SPELLS Proposers Day registration website, will be required to submit a completed Form 104 prior to admittance into the event. The Form 104 can be found directly on the DARPA website at http://www.darpa.mil/policy/visitor-information.

Any registrant who is not a U.S. citizen must complete and submit a DARPA Form 60 (U.S. Permanent Resident and Foreign National Visit Request) no later than July 22, 2020, at 5:00 PM (ET). This form and submission instructions are provided on the registration website.

Late registrations may be admitted after all pre-registered attendees are admitted, and only if room capacity allows. In addition, late registration processing requires significant coordination and may not be completed in time to attend Proposers Day.

Further administrative questions should be addressed to V-SPELLS@darpa.mil. Please refer to the V- SPELLS Proposers Day (DARPA-SN-20-55) in all correspondence.

http://www.darpa.mil/policy/visitor-information mailto:V-SPELLS@darpa.mil

TENTATIVE AGENDA

Start End Duration Item 12:00 PM 1:00 PM 1:00 Registration

1:00 PM 1:05 PM 0:05 Security Briefing SID Representative (Jim Andrews)

1:05 PM 1:35 PM 0:30 Contracts Management Office Briefing Mr. Mark Jones, DARPA CMO

1:35 PM 2:20 PM 0:45

Verified Security and Performance Enhancement of Large Legacy Software (V-SPELLS) Presentation Dr. Sergey Bratus, Program Manager, DARPA I2O

2:20 PM 2:25 PM 0:05 Submit Questions

2:25 PM 3:25 PM 1:00 PM Question Review and Informal Team Discussions

3:25 PM 4:00 PM 0:35 Q&A Session (Answer attendee questions)

ATTENDEE TEAMING

To assist those wanting to establish collaborative teaming efforts and business relationships, potential proposers may indicate on the registration website that they authorize their contact information to be shared among meeting participants. For organizations new to DARPA, this may be of use in connecting with potential partners. Team formation, communications, and networking are the sole responsibility of the participants. As noted above, the Proposers Day agenda has time for informal teaming discussions.

POINT OF CONTACT

All questions regarding the Proposers Day should be sent to V-SPELLS@darpa.mil.

mailto:V-SPELLS@darpa.mil