Software Assurance: The (only?) Way Ahead

Dr. Ramesh Bharadwaj

Center for High Assurance Computer Systems, Naval Research Laboratory, Washington DC

Abstract

The proliferation of code vulnerabilities in our software infrastructure is increasingly being exploited by our adversaries to compromise sensitive information, to conduct espionage, and for criminal activity. The speaker argues that our nation cannot continue to conduct business under the prevailing status quo, and makes a candid assessment of why perfectly feasible technical solutions have not made their way into practice.

Biography

Dr. Bharadwaj has been a researcher at Philips Research Laboratories, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Stanford University, Communications Research Laboratory, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. He was an engineer on the world's first experimental satellite packet switching network and was one of the first implementers of the Ethernet standard in hardware. While at the National Center for Software Technology in Bombay, Dr. Bharadwaj was a member of the group that was responsible for bringing the Internet to India. He has also served as project manager in Systems and Networking, having managed the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of a private packet switching network serving more that 25 institutions in the US and the UK. He also managed the development of a document transmission workstation for inter-library loans, which is in use at more than 10,000 research libraries around the world (including NRL). More recently, Dr. Bharadwaj has developed a secure middleware infrastructure for Naval Command and Control applications. His research interests include secure agents and agent based middleware, protocols for group communication, and mathematics based methods and tools for software engineering.

Presentation

The PowerPoint Slides are available