DARPA Microsystems Technology Office is seeking innovative proposals to develop hardware and software tools to guarantee that software is running correctly by combining formal methods and side-channels.
COOP seeks to develop tools and techniques to continuously guarantee that software is running correctly if and only if the device physics is correct. COOP combines formal methods and side-channels to unify computer science and physics. COOP solutions will continually guarantee software correctness on any digital processor with low overhead and falls within the category of computational integrity research. Analog and mixed-signal hardware are of interest, but only after program goals for digital hardware have been achieved.
COOP will consist of 2 x 18 month phases:
Phase 1 (Base) – demonstrate a COOP solution for a general-purpose processor with multi-threaded cores in simulation
Phase 2 (Option 1) – demonstrate the generizability of the COOP solution on general-purpose processors, graphics processing units and/or FPGAs. (ie works in a mission-relevant environment using real hardware).
Abstracts are strongly encouraged but not compulsory and are due 28 March 2024.
Full proposals are due 13 May 2024.
Document
Broad Agency Announcement – COOP: HR001124S0016
