The SoURCE CODE program is seeking to provide novel technologies to assist forensic experts in making determinations of the most likely attackers, based on coding styles. The program will explore full feature spaces in binary code and source code files to measure the similarity between files and provide information to forensic experts to the likely origins (country, groups, individuals, etc.). This capability would enable the automated matching of similar binaries from known samples, allowing analysts to speed up the attribution of malicious attacks to improve law enforcement and intelligence community responses.
Non-US entities and individuals can participate in the unclassified portion of Technical Area 1 of the program only, provided they are subcontracted to or employed by a US organisation. If the lead company is also submitting to the classified portion of Technical Area 1 or any other Technical Areas, foreign participation is not eligible.
Technical Area 1 Focus Areas:
- Feature Space Generation and Extraction – research and develop an encoding scheme that projects source code and binary representations of software into an optimized feature space wherein observations from the same classes are projected near one another, regardless of the representation of the software (binary or source code).
- Similarity and Demographic Analytic Algorithms – research and develop a system that will successfully identify similar binaries within a corpus using the stylistic characteristic of the software being analyzed
- Systems Explainability – Systems developed in TA1 must provide human-interpretable feedback providing evidence or explaining why specific documents likely are, or are not, similar or from a specific demographic group. Offerors shall propose novel evidentiary or explainability techniques to address this goal, and methods to evaluate this approach that are potentially generalizable to other performer approaches, including justifiable metrics.
Submissions are due 22 January 2024.
Document
Broad Agency Announcement – SoURCE CODE : IARPA-BAA-24-02
