SPECIAL NOTICE
A -- Proposers? Day Workshop for Application Communities
- Notice Date
- 7/26/2005
- Notice Type
- Special Notice
- NAICS
- 541710
— Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences
- Contracting Office
- Other Defense Agencies, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Contracts Management Office, 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22203-1714
- ZIP Code
- 22203-1714
- Solicitation Number
- SN05-33
- Response Due
- 8/8/2005
- Archive Date
- 8/23/2005
- Description
- PROPOSERS? DAY ANNOUNCEMENT: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) announces the Proposers? Day for Application Communities (AC). The goals of this Proposers? Day Workshop are to discuss the objectives of this anticipated effort, provide technical discussion on the topics of interest to the program, promote discussion between industry and government, foster teaming among potential proposers, and answer questions. DoD computing systems are highly reliant on Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software applications. Unfortunately, COTS applications are frequently vulnerable to security compromise and service disruption due to bugs, configuration errors, and operator errors. Such security and reliability failures pose a serious threat to the operational capabilities of military forces. This threat is exacerbated by the fact that DoD systems are frequently comprised of numerous copies of a small chosen set of COTS applications; these copies are vulnerable to the same problems and therefore to failing simultaneously or sequentially at the command of a skilled attacker. Such software homogeneity has strong manageability advantages, but the risk of catastrophic failure, or software blight, dramatically reduces the trust that should be placed in such systems wherever there is a channel through which malicious code or commands can be introduced. Significant research has focused on introducing software diversity to limit the impact of single flaws. Diversity appears to be a promising avenue for addressing common mode vulnerabilities, but it will likely increase management costs, and will probably have performance implications as well. An alternative is to augment applications to cooperate so different copies of an application collaboratively reason about their shared attributes to diagnose, protect, and monitor one another. The AC program seeks to develop a software execution infrastructure for existing COTS programs. This infrastructure will monitor and augment COTS application behavior so multiple active copies of an application X running under the infrastructure behave as a self-aware Application-X-Community that: 1) collaboratively diagnoses problems (attacks/bugs/errors), 2) collaboratively responds to problems by generating appropriate configuration changes, patches, filters, etc., and 3) collaboratively generates a community-specific situation awareness gauge that predicts likelihood and timing of imminent problems. In lieu of providing program success metrics up front, the AC program will request that AC researchers propose success metrics and the resources and time needed to achieve them, where the proposed metrics, if achieved, would justify commercial investment in products and services. The AC program seeks a small number of teams where each team covers all the technical areas and includes an integrator that can bring the resulting technology to market if the research is successful. The program will test the hypothesis that a collaborative reliability and defense system for black-box COTS applications can be made mostly automatic and that application communities encompassing a greater diversity of users and environments are more resilient in the face of unanticipated errors and attacks. The overarching goal of the AC program is to develop practical technology for on-line, mostly automatic, flaw and attack remediation for heavily-deployed black-box COTS applications. The AC program focuses on the scenario in which an application is used simultaneously by a variety of users and in a variety of settings. This program seeks to determine the extent to which diverse field data from these different users and settings can be combined with techniques such as static binary analysis, model checking, formal specifications, binary instrumentation, correlation, and historical information to characterize an application?s intended behavior, diagnose problems, block problems or attack recurrence, restart failed copies into safe states, and monitor health. The Application Communities Proposers? Day workshop will be held at the Hyatt Arlington, 1325 Wilson Boulevard, Arlington, VA 22209, on August 16, 2005, beginning at 9:00 am and ending at 4:30 pm, to be followed by a reception from 4:30 pm to 6:00 pm. Registration will begin at 8:00 am. The workshop will present an overview of Application Communities, and include invited presentations, poster session, discussions, and Q&A. If interested in attending please visit the registration website at https://www.schafertmd.com/acp2005/ . Attendees must be registered on the site by August 8, 2005 to attend the workshop. Due to space limitations, each organization is limited to three people. Workshop attendees must be U.S. Citizens. Attendance at the Proposers' Day is voluntary. Attendance is not required to propose to subsequent Broad Agency Announcements or research solicitations on this topic. It is anticipated that the cost for workshop attendance will be approximately $90 per attendee. DARPA will not provide cost reimbursement for workshop attendance. Workshop participants are invited to present in areas of technical competence related to Application Communities for purposes of technical discussion and teaming. Areas of technical competence for this program may include in no particular order: program analysis, anomaly detection, access control, software wrappers, virtual execution environments, software dynamic translation, program rewriting, formal modeling, peer-to-peer networking, anonymity, fault tolerance, intrusion tolerance, distributed processing, and information flow analysis, among others. Due to limited time, presenters will be selected from submitted abstracts for 10-minute time slots, including set-up and break-down. Abstracts must be received by August 3, 2005 and are limited to 250 words. All submitted abstracts will be provided to workshop attendees. If you wish to submit an abstract for presentation consideration, please inform John Frank by e-mail at Application.Communities@darpa.mil Additionally, there will be a poster session during the workshop. Attendees who wish to prepare posters must note this on the registration site. Program information from the Application Communities Proposers' Day may be posted to the website: http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/solicit/AC/index.htm after the workshop. All materials submitted to and presented at the Application Communities Proposers Day Workshop must be approved in advance by both the organization that funded the research and the DARPA Program Manager. The DARPA Program Manager will screen the material for sensitive, but unclassified material. For this reason, any material you wish to present at the workshop, including presentations and posters, must be received no later than August 12, 2005 in order to receive consideration. It is the presenters? responsibility to ensure the material has been approved for public release by the organization that funded the research. Written confirmation of this approval is requested when the material is submitted for the Program Manager?s review. Workshop Point of Contact: John Frank, Schafer Corporation Technical Point of Contact: Mr. Lee Badger, Program Manager, DARPA/IPTO Email to: Application.Communities@darpa.mil
- Record
- SN00855282-W 20050728/050726212958 (fbodaily.com)
- Source
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