DARPA Makes Finding Software Flaws Fun 46
alphadogg writes "The U.S. Department of Defense may have found a new way to scan millions of lines of software code for vulnerabilities: by turning the practice into a set of video games and puzzles and having volunteers do the work. Having gamers identify potentially problematic chunks of code could help lower the work load of trained vulnerability analysts by 'an order of magnitude or more,' said John Murray, a program director in SRI International's computer science laboratory who helped create one of the games, called Xylem. DARPA has set up a site, called Verigames, that offers five free games that can be played online or, in Xylem's case, on an Apple iPad."
Re:How does it work? (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked on Xylem when I was a grad student at UCSC. I was not on the team when it launched, so my info may be out of date.
What players are being asked to do is find loop invariants for code. The invariants are hard for a computer to come up with (and be useful), but are easier to check given certain bounds. So there is no predetermined win state, each answer is checked server-side to see if it holds up within the bounds (or, if the answer is already known, the cache hit is returned). If the invariant is complex and holds, it gets scored highly. If it's trivial and holds, it gets a lower score. If it doesn't hold, the instance where it doesn't hold is returned to the player.
Does this help?