Software Engineering Institute

October 29, 2018—The SEI has launched a new video series, “Innovation Snapshots,” that highlights new SEI-created capabilities, tools, or methods and the way they address real-world needs and challenges. These videos demonstrate the ways in which the SEI is solving complex, long-term problems for the Department of Defense, government agencies, and private industry.

The initial launch features the following topics:

• Exploring the System Design Tradespace. SEI researchers created this new prototype tool for exploring a system’s design tradespace. A “tradespace” comprises the possible combinations of system software, hardware, and configuration options. Our prototype, which combines previous SEI work with software developed at Penn State University, enables system designers to rapidly and automatically evaluate design options in the tradespace.
• Malfaces: Automating Malware Triage. Analysts can use this two-step process to visualize similarities between malware input files. The first tool uses binary code comparison techniques and a transform function to determine which input files match. The second tool uses statistical analysis to draw Chernoff faces for each file and delivers an estimate of how many unique programs are in the input files set. Together, these tools reduce file analysis to a differential analysis task, saving time and money that would otherwise be invested in reverse engineering after a cyber incident.
• Automating Repair of Pervasive Software Flaws. This video highlights an SEI tool that detects and automatically repairs two pervasive software flaws: integer overflow, which leads to buffer overflow, and reads of stale sensitive data. Automated repair dramatically reduces the cost and time needed to wring out pervasive vulnerabilities in software code.

Researchers at the SEI are always creating new ways to improve the practice of software engineering. Our job is to put this knowledge in the hands of the software engineering community at large. We do this through technical reports, webinars, blogs, classes, other detail-rich information products, SEI Cyber Minutes, and now through SEI Innovation Snapshots.

The videos are available from the SEI YouTube Channel.