Kurt Rohloff, an Associate Professor of Computer Science professor at NJIT, who heads up SafeWare, spoke to Signal Magazine today about the group’s work and insisted that while there are plenty of challenges ahead, the group is still in the early stages and that there is no particular application it was focusing on yet. The program, expected to last four years, is comprised of professors from the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and Raytheon BBN Technologies. SafeWare first solicited research proposals regarding program obfuscation last fall but it wasn’t until this past month that it officially got underway. Researchers with the unit, dubbed the SafeWare program, are hoping to develop new methods, bolstered by encryption, to obscure software code in hopes it its further deployment can lead to “provably secure protections for intellectual property.” Researchers with a DARPA-led team are looking into new ways to combat reverse engineering by using obfuscation to tidy up shoddy commercial and government security.
