Software brittleness may harden embedded systems

Legacy systems in the government are hard to secure against cyberattack, and that goes double for the embedded, real-time systems at the heart of the many control systems in advanced weapons, power plants and mission-critical infrastructure.

Galois, a Portland, Ore.,-based secure software developer, has linked up with the Office of Naval Research under a three-year, $2.7 million contract to tackle the problem. Leveraging what it calls “software brittleness,” Galois aims to complement the fault-tolerance that already exists in these systems to boost their resilience in the event of attack.