Intel and UC San Diego Join DARPA Program to Prevent Exploitation of Computing Systems
Technology for You
Intel and the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) announced recently that they have been selected to join the Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines (HARDEN) program team for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Adversaries have crafted increasingly complex cyberattacks in reaction to decades of platform-hardening efforts and increasing IT security measures that reduce vulnerabilities. Attempts to mitigate these threats have fallen short, creating an increased risk of intrusion into current and legacy code.

How It Works: To address threats of cyberattack, DARPA selected several teams to work on solutions to mitigate and prevent vulnerabilities in integrated computing systems. The four-year joint effort will focus on creating tools rooted in cryptography and formal security theories. As part of this effort, DARPA will utilize Intel’s Cryptographic Capability Computing (C3) system, the first stateless memory safety mechanism that effectively replaces inefficient metadata with efficient cryptography.

The HARDEN program will enable Intel and UC San Diego to further investigate and demonstrate C3’s potential to improve security for legacy and future systems on DARPA-hard challenge programs. This will further the goal of understanding how attackers turn parts of modern computing systems against the whole, so this can be prevented in the future.

What’s Next: The HARDEN program will run for 48 months and is organized into three phases: Phases 1 and 2 will each be 18 months, followed by a 12-month Phase 3. Intel is proud to be a part of this pioneering work with UC San Diego and DARPA, helping keep the U.S. government’s systems secure.
Link: https://www.technologyforyou.org/intel-and-uc-san-diego-join-darpa-program-to-prevent-exploitation-of-computing-systems/