Program Summary
As digital systems advance, they grow in complexity. Modern personal electronic devices typify this – mobile phones are systems of systems comprised of multiple discrete special purpose hardware components, replete with a variety of defensive mitigations, which range from sandboxing to hardware-enforced memory protections. In such complex systems, holistic evaluation of security posture is increasingly difficult, and the assessment of isolated sub-components is often insufficient.
Exploit chains represent the state of the art in provably asserting the vulnerability of complex digital systems. Exploit chains combine multiple vulnerabilities within different system components to establish initial access, elevate privilege, and deliver effects, ultimately demonstrating the potential for an exploit to achieve a degree of control over a vulnerable system. This approach to exploitation is inherently system-centric, as exploit chains cross multiple execution contexts, abuse trust relationships within a system to bypass security boundaries, and leverage exploit primitives that are only viable in tandem with exploits or within a specific environment.
Public disclosures of exploit chains, while still relatively uncommon, demonstrate the requisite level of complexity for attaining a meaningful degree of control over a system. Exploit chain compositions can range from as few as two discrete components to over a dozen and contain a combination of exploits and exploit primitives that satisfy constraints for chain components or improve exploit reliability.
DARPA’s Intelligent Generation of Tools for Security (INGOTS) program will address core limitations preventing the use of exploit chains as viable tools for evaluating the security of complex systems. INGOTS will achieve this goal through novel research into the creation, modification, modeling, and analysis of exploit chains, yielding new technologies and techniques that accelerate and automate the creation and maintenance of exploit chains, thereby enabling their timely application on a tempo that matches pace with the evolution of modern systems.
INGOTS is a 36-month program organized into three 12-month phases. INGOTS will produce both advances in theory and in concrete application, including tools and technology that enable the synthesis, modification, modeling, and analysis of exploit chains. Ultimately, INGOTS will result in new technologies that shift exploit chains from the realm of the bespoke to that of the practical, enabling their everyday use as vital tools for vulnerability research on modern complex systems.
Additional information is available in the INGOTS broad agency announcement.