GrammaTech Receives U.S. Office of Naval Research Contract to Address Cyber-Security Concerns of Complex Computing Systems

ITHACA, NY — GrammaTech, Inc., a leading software company specializing in software assurance tools and cyber-security solutions, announced that the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded GrammaTech an SBIR contract to advance adaptive computing technology.

Within this contract, GrammaTech is working to enhance computer security, a critical issue to both national security and the private sector. Breaches in security can wreak havoc in many different ways, most notably by compromising the operation of critical infrastructure or resulting in the loss of sensitive data.

Modern computer systems have become so complex that they have nearly outgrown their ability to be entirely understood. The sheer number of software components – and the myriad of interactions between them on a single desktop computer – is itself a difficult security challenge that confounds modern protection technologies. Every day, new exploits are introduced that are able to sidestep existing defenses by taking advantage of obscure combinations of software bugs or unexpected behaviors. GrammaTech’s experts in software security are working on innovative efforts to diagnose and develop new counter-measures to each of these new threats.

“We are working on a new paradigm for building system security that provides the computer itself with the tools to diagnose new attacks, reason about their impact on the system, and implement countermeasures automatically,” explained Tim Teitelbaum, GrammaTech’s CEO. “We believe this so-called ‘autonomic computing’ approach offers the potential for complex computer systems to police themselves, by detecting intrusion, performing self-healing, and countering cyber threats directly.”