Disrupting Exploitable Patterns in Software to Make Systems Safer

The Hardening Development Toolchains Against Emergent Execution Engines (HARDEN) program seeks to give developers a way to understand emergent behaviors and thereby create opportunity to choose abstractions and implementations that limit an attacker’s ability to reuse them for malicious purposes, thus stopping the unintentional creation of weird machines. HARDEN will explore novel theories and approaches and develop practical tools to anticipate, isolate, and mitigate emergent behaviors in computing systems throughout the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC).