GrammaTech Awarded DARPA Research Grant to Investigate Static Analysis of AI Systems

Toolkits for Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly being used in government and industry. If such systems have access to sensitive information, it is important to know their security properties. A toolkit may contain low-level flaws, such as buffer-overrun errors that allow an attacker to gain control of the host system. Or, there may be flaws in the rule base of a system implemented with the toolkit that allow unauthorized access to sensitive information. Under this SBIR contract, GrammaTech will perform a detailed study of the security properties of CLIPS, a widely used expert-system shell, in two parts. The first part will be a detailed analysis of the source code of the system using static analysis tools and other methods to find low-level flaws. The second part will be a study of the CLIPS language and the exploration of static and dynamic approaches to create secure CLIPS programs.