Dramatically Reducing Software Vulnerabilities: Report to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

The call for a dramatic reduction in software vulnerability is heard from multiple sources, recently from the February 2016 Federal Cybersecurity Research and Development Strategic Plan. This plan starts by describing well known risks: current systems perform increasingly vital tasks and are widely known to possess vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are often not easy to discover and difficult to correct. Cybersecurity has not kept pace, and the pace that is needed is rapidly accelerating. The goal of this report is to present a list of specific technical approaches that have the potential to make a dramatic difference in reducing vulnerabilities – by stopping them before they occur, by finding them before they are exploited or by reducing their impact.