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.
Modern-day software operates within a complex ecosystem of libraries, models, protocols and devices. Ecosystems change over time in response to new technologies or paradigms, as a consequence of repairing discovered vulnerabilities (security, logical, or performance-related), or because of varying resource availability and reconfiguration of the underlying execution platform. When these changes occur, applications may no longer work as expected because their assumptions on how the ecosystem should behave may have been inadvertently violated.
DARPA initiated the Building Resource Adaptive Software Systems (BRASS) program in 2015, seeking to realize and implement long-lived software systems that are capable of dynamically adapting to changes in the resources they depend on and environments in which they operate. This could make them essentially “immortal” since the software will continue to work without updates, software hacks or emulation as new digital platforms are released.
Ensuring applications can seamlessly continue to operate correctly and usefully in the face of such changes is a formidable challenge. Failure to effectively and timely adapt to ecosystem evolution can result in technically inferior and potentially vulnerable systems, but the lack of automated mechanisms to restructure and transform applications when changes do occur leads to high software maintenance costs and premature obsolescence of otherwise functionally sound systems and complicates the construction of autonomous mission-critical programs. Neither of these outcomes is desirable and poses significant risk to economic productivity and cyber resilience.
“Technology inevitably evolves, but very often corresponding changes in libraries, data formats, protocols, input characteristics and models of components in a software ecosystem undermine the behavior of applications,” said Suresh Jagannathan, DARPA program manager. “The inability to seamlessly adapt to new operating conditions undermines productivity, hampers the development of cyber-secure infrastructure and raises the long-term risk that access to important digital content will be lost as the software that generates and interprets content becomes outdated.”
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change,”said Charles Darwin. DARPA wants to build software for adaptive systems under BRASS.
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