Systems & Technology Research LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N171-054

Description

Low-cost embedded FPGA devices rarely contain any cyber security measures. To combat this threat, the military is heavily investing in the development of a wide range of defensive tools. These tools require extensive redteam-style testing to assess efficacy. To address these challenges, Systems & Technology Research (STR) proposes to develop a Python toolkit that will inject malware code into the various stages of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) synthesis process. We call this approach Cyber Redteam Injection Toolkit (CRIT). CRIT will be integrated with the vendor-specific toolchain and manipulate intermediate design checkpoint files to insert varying degrees of malware at various stages in the synthesis pipeline. CRIT consists of both the Python code to manipulate the checkpoint files, the firmware produced and the hardware used for testing. This combined hardware and software solution will enable testers to generate many permutations of malware and evaluate efficacy of defensive techniques under a range of observable performance degradations. Phase I will focus on framework generation and proof-of-concept malware insertion. Phase II will focus on increasing the sophistication of the inserted malware.