The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants white hat hackers to try and find weaknesses in new hardware-level security mechanisms that it has developed over the past few years to protect systems from cyberattacks.
Between July and September this year DARPA, along with crowdsourced security management firm Synack, will host a bug bounty program where researchers from around the world will have an opportunity to take a crack at technologies developed under DARPA's System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) effort.
Individuals who qualify for the bug bounty program will be given access to emulated systems running on Amazon's cloud infrastructure. Each emulated system will include SSITH hardware-security controls and run software stacks with known vulnerabilities. Bug hunters who are able to exploit these software vulnerabilities by bypassing DARPA's hardware security mechanisms will be eligible for bounties ranging from thousands- to tends of thousands of dollars.
"SSITH hardware defenses are focused on tackling seven vulnerabilities classes identified by the MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration Specification (CWE) and NIST," says Keith Rebello, program manager, DARPA Microsystems Technology Office (MTO). The vulnerabilities include those that enable exploitation of permissions and privilege in the system architectures, memory errors, information leakage, and code injection.
"We're asking ethical hackers and analysts to disclose weaknesses in the hardware defenses that could lead to exploitation via one of these vulnerability classes," he says.
DARPA launched the SSITH program in 2017 as part of an effort to make it harder for cybercriminals to exploit hardware vulnerabilities through software. The goal is to develop ideas and tools that system-on-chip designers could use to safeguard hardware against all known classes of hardware vulnerabilities, Rebello says.
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