Anti-Fragility Workstation for Resiliency (AWARE) II

AIS (with its subcontractor Zephyr Technologies, LLC) proposes Antifragility Workstation for Resiliency (AWARE) Phase II to research, design, and productize an enterprise-scale system that applies anti-fragile concepts to running enterprise software such that the softwares ability to learn from and adapt to attacks enables it to improve over time as attacks and other faults are experienced. AWARE will bolster the security of mission critical systems and free them from fragile, static configurations and lengthy patch cycles by embracing the benefits of sophisticated software transformations and powerful introspection techniques on modern hypervisors. AWARE builds on two contemporary powerful technologies to achieve anti-fragility in software. First, our subcontractor Zephyr brings Helix technology which, as recently showcased in DARPAs Cyber Grand Challenge program, shows much promise in the application of security transformations to executable binaries to increase their resilience to attack. Second, AIS brings IntroVirt, a hypervisor-based introspection capability for monitoring and manipulating the code executing within guest VMs. The novel aspect of this effort will be utilizing the code monitoring techniques of IntroVirt to provide Helix with feedback regarding the performance of operational code, thereby creating a feedback loop which enables the creation of additional transformations.