SBIR/STTR Award attributes
Defense systems increasingly depend on digital devices, many of which use third-party intellectual property (3PIP) to shorten the development lifecycle and reduce cost. These designs may contain hidden or unintended functionality making them prone to compromise. Traditional testing approaches are expensive, time consuming, and progressively ineffective against sophisticated cyber-attacks. Formal Method Verification (FMV) provide a mathematically rigorous way to verify that designs implement only their intended purposes. These methods are needed to fully ensure security of designed systems against potential attacks, as well as escaped defects. New advances in cloud computing infrastructure have made it easier to access more powerful, distributed computing resources needed to apply FMV in a cost-effective way. Leveraging cloud computing effectively for FMV also requires intuitive tools for optimally managing these resources. To address the issues of usability and scalability of FMV solutions, the FormalCloud effort will leverage commercial cloud services and a leading commercial FMV tool to deploy formal methods tools in a distributed environment. ECI will also leverage its capabilities in developing enterprise dashboards to provide intuitive management of these formal methods within the cloud. This will provide FMV scalability and redundancy on a much larger scale to meet the needs of trusted microelectronics.
