Charles River Analytics Inc., developer of intelligent systems solutions, is applying systemic functional grammars to increase cyber resilience under a program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The four-year contract for Grammar-Based Elicitation and Analysis of Requirements for Cyber Assured Systems Engineering (GearCASE) effort is valued at $3.2 million with options. Charles River is leading a team on the GearCASE effort that includes Rockwell Collins and Skaion.

DARPA’s Cyber Assured Systems Engineering (CASE) program seeks to develop techniques that treat cyber resiliency as a first-class system requirement. The goal of cyber resilience is to avoid or mitigate cyberattacks.

“Under DARPA’s CASE program, we’re automatically generating formally-verifiable cybersecurity requirements—essentially eliminating vulnerabilities during the design phase,” said Dr. Terry Patten, Principal Scientist at Charles River.

“We’re building on our success under DARPA’s VET program, where sophisticated grammar formalisms from linguistics proved to be an effective, compact representation of the attack space,” added Dr. Patten. “Under VET, we used these grammars to represent potential vulnerabilities of an existing system; under CASE, we’re using them to represent potential vulnerabilities of a to-be-designed system.”

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) under Contract No. N66001-18-C-4004. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA or SSC Pacific.