GrammaTech Awarded Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Contract for Securing Embedded-Systems Software

GrammaTech, Inc., a leading maker of tools that improve and accelerate software development, today announced that the company has begun working on an SBIR contract sponsored by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Within this research project, GrammaTech is creating is developing GenPatcher, a fully automated end-to-end solution for securing embedded-systems software.

Modern civilization relies on a network of embedded devices that are riddled with security vulnerabilities and remotely hackable. Unfortunately, there seems to be near universal neglect for ensuring the security of these devices. Moreover, the existing IT solutions, such as antivirus software and intrusion-detection systems, do not provide substantial benefits for protection of embedded systems.

To create GenPatcher for the Department of Homeland Security, GrammaTech is integrating ongoing research on vulnerability discovery and patch evaluation with recent breakthroughs in genetic program repair. The key advantage of GenPatcher is its ability to operate completely autonomously, without requiring human interaction. Thus, GenPatcher will significantly reduce the costs of vetting and deploying critical software.

GenPatcher will operate directly on software binaries, even in the absence of source code, protecting newly developed software, third-party codes, and legacy software equally well. The technology will also be easily retargetable to different instruction sets to accommodate a variety of platforms employed in the embedded systems domain.