Sentar Wins Digital Microscope (DM) Phase I

HUNTSVILLE – The U.S. Air Force has awarded a $99,879 contract to Sentar Inc., Huntsville, for Digital Microscope.  The contract was awarded by the Air Force Research Laboratory, Rome, N.Y.  Sentar, teamed with SYColeman and Reifer Consultants, developed a concept to address the critical issues of software defects and vulnerabilities in Code, be it C, C__, Java, or Visual Basic., called the Digital Microscope (DM) under a Phase I SBIR with U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command.  The DM simulates a native running environment in which a binary code can be encapsulated, analyzed, and tested for malefactor influence, as well as poor coding practices.  The design of the DM will allow, for example, the testing of code through injection of timing mismatches, embedded codes, and buffer overflow attempts into the binary, all in a quarantined environment.  It will also promote plug-and-play extensibility through the use of a multi-agent infrastructure for future enhancements such as security wrapper insertions, proof generation, and attack modeling and simulation.  The resulting technology will substantially contribute to software vulnerability discovery and remediation by providing a comprehensive tool for validation of code safety prior to deployment.