Clean slate design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

DARPA's Clean Slate design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts (CRASH) program (Funding Opportunity Number DARPA BAA 10-70) is a research solicitation aimed at fundamentally rethinking how computer systems are built so they can remain trustworthy even in hostile cyber environments. Rather than trying to bolt incremental security features onto today's mainstream architectures, CRASH is explicitly about "clean slate" approaches that pursue major, non-incremental advances in system security and survivability. The focus is on designing next-generation computer systems that are not only hard to compromise, but also capable of continuing to operate in useful ways even when compromises occur.

The opportunity centers on four core capabilities that DARPA wants future hosts and computing platforms to exhibit. First, systems should be highly resistant to cyber attack, meaning they should be engineered to prevent or sharply limit successful exploitation in the first place. Second, if an attacker does get in, the system should be able to adapt after a successful attack and continue providing useful services, emphasizing resilience and graceful degradation instead of total failure. Third, the system should be able to learn from previous attacks, using evidence from intrusions or attempted compromises to improve how it defends itself and how it responds in the future. Fourth, it should be able to repair itself after attacks succeed, implying automated or semi-automated recovery, restoration of integrity, and reconstitution of trustworthy operation without requiring extensive manual rebuilds.

DARPA signals that proposals may draw on a wide range of technical directions, including novel hardware architectures, new operating systems and other system software, new programming languages and development environments, and new formal methods for specifying and proving properties of systems. Importantly, the program encourages co-design across layers, for example pairing a new hardware architecture with an operating system and language/runtime designed to exploit that hardware's security and isolation properties, or combining formal verification techniques with language and OS mechanisms that make strong guarantees enforceable in practice. The solicitation frames these as examples rather than constraints, leaving room for unconventional combinations as long as they support the clean-slate objective and deliver genuinely transformative improvements.

A key theme in the announcement is the boundary between revolutionary and evolutionary work. DARPA is looking for approaches that enable "revolutionary advances" in science, devices, and/or systems, and it specifically excludes research that primarily produces evolutionary improvements to the current state of practice. In practical terms, that means proposals that mainly harden existing commodity stacks, add incremental detection tools, or tweak conventional architectures without rethinking core assumptions are not what the program is seeking. The program intent is to explore new foundations for secure and resilient computing, where the overall design philosophy changes rather than simply adding more defenses onto existing designs.

From an administrative standpoint, this is a discretionary Department of Defense research opportunity with funding instruments listed as cooperative agreements and procurement contracts, and it falls under the Science and Technology and other Research and Development activity category. The CFDA number is 12.910 (Research and Technology Development). Cost sharing is not required. Eligibility is listed as unrestricted, meaning any type of entity may apply, subject to any clarifications in the full announcement. The opportunity was posted on June 1, 2010, with an original and current closing date of July 16, 2010, and an archive date of November 26, 2010. Award floor and ceiling are shown as 0 in the summary record, which typically indicates that specific award sizing and totals are governed by the full BAA and the set of proposals received rather than being fixed in the summary.

The full details, including exact proposal instructions, evaluation criteria, deliverables, and any specific topic areas or technical metrics, are contained in the attached Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) referenced as DARPA BAA 10-70 (also linked via FedBizOpps in the original posting). For access issues, the listing provides a point of contact: Howard Shrobe, BAA Coordinator.

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