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From the phys.org article:
As modern software systems continue inexorably to increase in complexity and capability, users have become accustomed to periodic cycles of updating and upgrading to avoid obsolescence—if at some cost in terms of frustration. In the case of the U.S. military, having access to well-functioning software systems and underlying content is critical to national security, but updates are no less problematic than among civilian users and often demand considerable time and expense. That is why today DARPA announced it will launch an ambitious four-year research project to investigate the fundamental computational and algorithmic requirements necessary for software systems and data to remain robust and functional in excess of 100 years.
The Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems, or BRASS, program seeks to realize foundational advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that can dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon and environments in which they operate. Such advances will necessitate the development of new linguistic abstractions, formal methods, and resource-aware program analyses to discover and specify program transformations, as well as systems designed to monitor changes in the surrounding digital ecosystem. The program is expected to lead to significant improvements in software resilience, reliability and maintainability.
DARPA's press release and call for research proposals.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Friday April 10 2015, @01:59AM
If a software based system is expected to remain in service more than a few years, making it even more complex than current systems is exactly the wrong direction. A modern system is already a clusterfsck of bogosity held together by a constant stream of patches.
TCP/IP itself isn't even really securable in any sort of real sense.
What is needed is a total rethink, ground up. Silicon designed to facilitate secure code, provable secure software designs, languages and tools to produce provable secure code, securable data interchange methods developed, tested and hardened and finally standardized interchangable hardware modules with documentation so precise and complete that the very silicon could be clean room reconstituted from only the published docs... and that this demonstrated by doing it. New traditions will be required too, such as one mandating that this hyper complete documentation along with all source code (even 'closed source' code) always be loaded onto each machine so that maintenance, decades after the original manufacturer and programmer are not just gone but perhaps even unknown, always remains possible. UI conventions will need to be thought out to a point that they could be standardized and frozen to a level that fifty year old interfaces would still be comprehensible without a rewrite.
And all these things and more will be done. Just as soon as a hack of the existing insecure 'roach motel' software infrastructure causes a large enough loss of human life. Imagine a near future when millions of Google Cars get a bogus update by the 'Cyber Jihad' and on a preset date they all pair off and head end each other at max speed. Just one incident like that will force the end to current programming practice. Agile my ass. Ship something now and patch em in the field is more like it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @05:29AM
This is similar in justification, if not implementation, to Urbit [github.com] and its idea of Martian Programming [blogspot.com].
Even if it leads nowhere, there are people attempting this today.