Visualizing Codebases as Cities

Understanding large code bases is hard. It can take months for an experienced engineer to get comfortable navigating and manipulating large software projects. At Galois, we’re developing tools to generate 3D representations of code bases visualized as cities to help engineers get oriented faster, and to develop a shared visual reference for team conversations and […]

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Advancing the State of the Art in Zero Knowledge Proofs: SIEVE Wrap Up

Galois recently completed its work on DARPA’s Securing Information for Encrypted Verification and Evaluation (SIEVE) program, which sought to “advance the state of the art in Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to enable complex, DoD-relevant applications.” Over the course of working on SIEVE, our research pushed ZKP performance forward significantly, making the task—once considered far too […]

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How Do You Modernize Safety Critical Designs in Nuclear Power? RDE!

Nuclear power plants in the United States are part of what the Department of Homeland Security identifies as “nationally critical infrastructure,” a category that also includes our vast transportation network, water systems, electrical grids, and more. For decades, even as other parts of the nation’s infrastructure began using computers, American nuclear power plants avoided integrating […]

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What are Self-Organizing Maps?

Self-organizing maps, or SOMs, are a category of machine-learning (ML) algorithm used for clustering data points with similar variables. They are useful both for exploring the structure of unlabeled data sets and for creating classifiers for complex, messy data that may be problematic for more traditional ML algorithms. This is because they lend themselves to […]

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Rigorous Robot Security: How Galois’s RDE Framework Is Streamlining NIST Compliance and Change Impact Analysis for Cyber-Physical Systems

In 2003, just as the invasion of Iraq was heating up, the U.S. Army reached out to the University of Minnesota’s Center for Distributed Robotics (CDR). They needed compact robots capable of providing real-time reconnaissance and situational awareness for troops on the ground. The CDR, the army knew, was already engaged in developing advanced remote-controlled […]

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The Need for Speed: Revolutionizing CPS Design with AI

For more than two decades, the Need for Speed (NFS) video game franchise captured the hearts of young gamers across the globe with its high-octane thrills, heart-pounding car chases, and the adrenaline rush of illegal street racing. Yet for many, especially those who played the earliest iterations in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, NFS […]

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Generative AI for Specifications 

System engineering involves a delicate interplay between three tasks: specification (what a system should do); implementation (what a system actually does); and verification (determining whether they agree). Already, novel generative AI technologies have emerged that can assist with implementation and verification (e.g., respectively, Microsoft’s CoPilot, and formal verification tools developed on DARPA’s PEARLS Artificial Intelligence […]

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Prevent the Next XZ Incident: Galois’s LAGOON Tool Offers an Answer to Open-Source Software Threats

In March, 2024, researchers discovered a backdoor hidden in an update of open-source Linux tool XZ Utils – a vulnerability that appears likely to be the result of a multi-year, state-sponsored supply chain attack. This latest close call is only the most recent in a growing history of incidents underscoring the fragility of a modern […]

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