Biblio

STONESOUP develops and demonstrates comprehensive, automated techniques that allow end users to securely execute software without basing risk mitigations on characteristics of provenance that have a dubious relationship to security. Existing techniques to find and remove software vulnerabilities are costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. Many risk management decisions are therefore based on qualitative and subjective assessments of the software suppliers' trustworthiness. STONESOUP develops software analysis, confinement, and diversification techniques so that non-experts can transform questionable software into more secure versions without changing the behavior of the programs.

Government agencies and the military rely upon many kinds of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) commodity Information Technology (IT) devices, including mobile phones, printers, computer workstations and many other everyday items. Each of these devices is the final product of long supply chains involving many vendors from many nations providing various components and subcomponents, including considerable amounts of software and firmware. Long supply chains provide adversaries with opportunities to insert hidden malicious functionality into this software and firmware that adversaries can exploit to accomplish harmful objectives, including exfiltration of sensitive data and sabotage of critical operations.

We propose 10 challenges for making automation components into effective "team players" when they interact with people in significant ways. Our analysis is based on some of the principles of human-centered computing that we have developed individually and jointly over the years, and is adapted from a more comprehensive examination of common ground and coordination.