Portland, OR-based Galois announced on July 16 that it been awarded a $7.5 million contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to work on PIRATE, a set of software development tools for designing and building high-performance, physically-partitioned applications that protect sensitive information.
PIRATE stands for Partitioning Information via Resource-Aware Transformations for Everyone. The project is part of DARPA’s Guaranteed Architecture for Physical Security (GAPS) program, which focuses on developing hardware and software architectures that can provide physically provable guarantees around high-risk transactions, or where data moves between systems of different security levels.
Today, DoD, other government agencies and commercial organizations face a time consuming and extended accreditation process when building systems and applications that process sensitive information (military and intelligence systems, medical systems, financial systems, etc.). With PIRATE, Galois aims to address this challenge by accelerating the development of real-time interconnected applications with built-in multilevel security. To ensure the technology can be used across a range of commercial and government applications, much of the work is focused on building extensions to existing open-source tools and technologies.
PIRATE’s goal is to enable developers to rapidly build systems where sensitive information can be securely stored and safely shared when approved. The company aims to produce a framework and tools that make that type of application development easier and more accessible. Galois envisions a process where a “GAPS-built” system or application using our framework and tools will go through the certification and accreditation process much more quickly and securely.
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