SAM #DARPA-SN-27-13

DARPA RFI for Natural-Language Network Compliance Verification Tools

DARPA is seeking information about tools and methods for checking whether network configurations meet requirements written in natural language. - Agency and notice: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO); Request for Information (RFI), not an award or stated solicitation for a purchase. - Capability sought: A tool or approach that accepts natural-language requirements and concrete network configurations. - In an offline phase, identify inconsistencies, redundancies, and gaps, then produce a consistent, non-redundant, completed set of requirements. - Check network configurations against the requirements in near real time and provide human-understandable results. - Objective: Reduce the time and cost of verifiable compliance checking by two to three orders of magnitude. - Commercial details: No OEMs, vendors, named products, quantities, contract value, or period of performance are specified. No product or service line items are provided.

Description

Modern networks need to be reconfigured quickly in response to mission changes or emerging threats, but checking compliance with security requirements can take months. This creates a window in which adversaries may exploit vulnerabilities introduced by those changes. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) seeks information on approaches, tools and practices for closing that window by reducing, by 2-3 orders of magnitude, the time and cost of verifiable compliance checking. DARPA envisions a capability that would take as input two items: (a) a requirements document written in natural language and (b) the configurations in a concrete network. In an offline phase, it would reason about the requirements for inconsistency, redundancy and incompleteness, and output consistent, non-redundant and completed requirements. Then, it would check, in near real-time, whether the concrete configurations satisfy all of the requirements. In all cases, its output would be understandable by a human.

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