Raytheon teams up with GrammaTech to help US government prevent malware

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected Raytheon BBN Technologies and GrammaTech to develop technologies to help US government prevent malware in information technology (IT) devices.

Under the $4.8m contract, awarded as part of the DARPA’s Vetting Commodity IT Software and Firmware (VET), the team will develop tools and techniques for organisations to inspect the software and firmware and protect from malware attack.

GrammaTech chief executive officer Tim Teitelbaum said the scientists are developing new technology intended to advance the state-of-the-art for analysing machine code.

"We are leveraging these advances to create a tool that could confirm the absence of broad classes of vulnerabilities," Teitelbaum added.
The VET programme has been designed to help US government agencies address the malicious code and hidden backdoor access threats in commodity IT devices.

Raytheon BBN Technologies Cyber Security vice president Jack Marin said,"The VET program seeks to enable DoD analysts to vigorously vet software and firmware devices before they are connected to our critical networks."

Raytheon will develop techniques to enable analysts to prioritise elements of software and firmware to examine for hidden malicious functionality while GrammaTech will develop the tools to examine the software and firmware while enabling analysts to demonstrate that they do not have exploitable security vulnerabilities.