Vencore to develop advanced cryptographic obfuscation techniques for DARPA

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has awarded Vencore, Inc.’s research subsidiary, Vencore Labs, Inc., a $3.7 million contract as a prime contractor to deliver research and proof-of-concept implementations in the area of efficient program obfuscation, the Chantilly, VA-based company announced January 15.  The work will be performed as part of DARPA’s SafeWare Program.

The aim of the SafeWare research is to develop highly efficient and widely applicable program obfuscation methods with mathematically proven security properties. These techniques will make it more difficult for adversaries to reverse engineer software in captured equipment.

“This research will focus on enabling highly secure, highly efficient techniques that meet real-world applications and are most relevant to the Department of Defense in defending programs against reverse engineering attacks,” said Steven Omick, Ph. D., president of Vencore Labs. “This work builds on our expertise in cyber security and applied research can help our customer stay ahead of the technological curve in defending against those types of attacks.”

Vencore Labs will team with New Jersey Institute of Technology and BBN Technologies. Specifically, the team will leverage its prior work on efficient protocols for privacy-preserving computation and homomorphic encryption completed under DARPA’s  Programming Computation on Encrypted Data (PROCEED) program and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) Security and Privacy Assurance Research (SPAR) program.

Source: Vencore, Inc.