Request for Information (RFI): Verification and Compliance Checking for Natural-Language Network Requirements (FastVacc)
Open Special Notice Posted
- Solicitation number
- DARPA-SN-27-13
- Agency
-
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Department of Defense
- Responses due
- Set-aside
- No set-aside
Opportunity facts
- NAICS code
- 541715 Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences (except Nanotechnology and Biotechnology)
- Points of contact
Notice details come from SAM.gov. Updated .
About this opportunity
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office issued a Request for Information (Special Notice DARPA-SN-27-13) on verification and compliance checking for natural-language network requirements, with responses due November 13, 2026, at 5:00 PM Eastern Time. No set-aside is used. Eligible respondents include private and public companies, individuals, universities, not-for-profit research institutions, and U.S. Government-sponsored labs.
DARPA seeks approaches, tools, and practices that reduce the time and cost of verifiable compliance checking by 2-3 orders of magnitude. The envisioned capability would accept a natural-language requirements document and concrete network configurations as inputs, reason offline about requirement inconsistency, redundancy, and incompleteness, and then check in near real-time whether the configurations satisfy all requirements. All outputs must be understandable by a human.
Responses must be unclassified and submitted to FastVacc@darpa.mil. Each response consists of a one-page narrative and two slides with visual depictions, including a completed Table 1 matrix. Files must be unprotected Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or PDF, with 12-point font on 8.5-by-11-inch paper and 1-inch margins. DARPA will not reimburse response costs and assumes no obligation to acknowledge receipt, acknowledge feedback, or use identified tools.
Notice text
Modern networks need to be reconfigured quickly in response to mission changes or emerging threats, but checking compliance with security requirements can take months. This creates a window in which adversaries may exploit vulnerabilities introduced by those changes. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) seeks information on approaches, tools and practices for closing that window by reducing, by 2-3 orders of magnitude, the time and cost of verifiable compliance checking. DARPA envisions a capability that would take as input two items: (a) a requirements document written in natural language and (b) the configurations in a concrete network. In an offline phase, it would reason about the requirements for inconsistency, redundancy and incompleteness, and output consistent, non-redundant and completed requirements. Then, it would check, in near real-time, whether the concrete configurations satisfy all of the requirements. In all cases, its output would be understandable by a human.
Files
| File | Type | Posted |
|---|---|---|
| DARPA-SN-27-13.pdf |
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