Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines (HARDEN)
Abstract
The Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines (HARDEN) program is developing techniques and tools to anticipate, isolate, and mitigate emergent system behaviors and thereby improve security of complex integrated software. Today's software development toolchains and testing methodologies provide very limited means for reasoning about adversarial reuse of code as written and designed. This limitation results in unwitting creation of stable, reliable patterns of emergent behaviors within systems that adversaries can reuse in attacks. The HARDEN approach to preventing adversarial code reuse is to create techniques, tools, metadata, and instrumentation for reasoning about emergent execution at all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC), and for flagging code segments and design patterns where there is high potential for adversarial reuse and emergent execution. To assess their utility, HARDEN technologies will be applied to critical system elements such as bootloaders and to integrated software systems. If successful, the technologies developed by HARDEN will facilitate efficient mitigation of complex code-reuse and emergent-execution vulnerabilities at early SDLC stages, and provide the stronger roots-of-trust required by zero-trust architectures and high-assurance integrated military software systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Accomplishment
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2025
- Source ID
- 8363062b745c1e26429f8c4d03ab5080