You Can’t Defend What You Can’t Define - Sergey Bratus - PSW #816

As a computer-smitten middle-schooler in the former Soviet Union in the 1970s, to his current and prominent role in the cybersecurity research community, Bratus aims to render the increasingly prevalent and perilous software, hardware, and networks in our lives much safer to use. His fascination with computer security started for real in the 1990s as a mathematics graduate student when a computer he was programming and responsible for at Northeastern University in Boston was taken over by a hacker. That experience set him on his life’s mission to learn as much as he can about the vulnerabilities of software and hardware with the goal of learning how to best minimize or eliminate those vulnerabilities. Noting his embrace of the hacker community for its deep and innovative expertise in this context, Bratus’s portfolio at DARPA could help reduce or entirely remove even some of the most stealthy and unexpected vulnerabilities that reside in software and its logical, computational, and mathematical foundations.

Segment Resources:

• Overall Portfolio: https://www.darpa.mil/staff/dr-sergey-bratus

• Safe Documents: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-06-14

• Enhanced SBOM for Optimized Software Sustainment: https://sam.gov/opp/d0af3e325a594a8191b94e3f80b6bdcd/view

• V-SPELLS program:  https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/18/darpalegacybinary_patching/

• Digital Corpora Project:  https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpl-creates-worlds-largest-pdf-archive-to-aid-malware-research

• SocialCyber:  https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/07/14/1055894/us-military-sofware-linux-kernel-open-source/

• Weird Machines:  https://www.darpa.mil/program/hardening-development-toolchains-against-emergent-execution-engines

• Safe Docs: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-06-14

• Exploit programming:  https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/december-2011-volume-36-number-6/exploit-programming-buffer-ove

Show Notes: https://securityweekly.com/psw-816