Fiscal Year	2023
Division	Research & Sponsored Programs
Department	Naval Research Program
Investigator(s)	Thompson, Michael
Sponsor	NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary	The ability to protect or target real time embedded systems depends in large part on having visibility into the detailed operation of the software within those systems. Gaining such visibility can be constrained by the lack of access to copies of the target systems, and by practical limitations when trying to instrument such systems. Use of digital twins of real target systems removes the need to obtain multiples of the target hardware for use in testing and analysis. Additionally, digital twins can be instrumented in ways not possible with real hardware, thereby facilitating insight into software behavior and analysis of potential vulnerabilities. This research will employ and extend the NPS-developed RESim reverse engineering platform to conduct vulnerability analysis of applications within embedded networked computers through use of digital twins. Research goals include improved code coverage for testing and protocol discovery though human-assisted fuzzing.
Keywords	Digital-twins, Reverse-engineering, fuzzing, vulnerability-analysis
Publications	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data	Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal