Every day, individuals and organisations in military, government and commercial industries receive electronic content, such as PDF and digital media files, from unauthorised or potentially compromised sources, which creates security risks.

Anne Taylor, product line director of the cyber technology group at BAE Systems, said, "Research on the SafeDocs program will leverage BAE Systems' expertise in cyber, algorithmic and systems engineering domains to give developers tools that currently don't exist in government or commercial markets to more easily and efficiently ensure the security of electronic documents."

As part of the SafeDocs program, BAE Systems’ FAST Labs research and development team will create two different cyber tools.

The first tool seeks to recover, simplify and automatically select safe feature subsets within electronic data formats to help encode the data safely and unambiguously, while the second is a toolkit to help software developers avoid vulnerabilities in the software they create to process complex electronic data.

"As the creation and use of electronic documents continues to grow every day, so does the risk for potential cyber attacks, making it essential we create solutions that are built with security in mind to help keep content safe," Taylor added. 

The research for phase one of the SafeDocs program, which is being developed with funding from DARPA, adds to BAE Systems' cyber technology portfolio. Work for the program will be completed with teammate American University and will take place at the company’s facilities in Arlington, Virginia, and Burlington, Massachusetts.

Stephen Kuper

Steve has an extensive career across government, defence industry and advocacy, having previously worked for cabinet ministers at both Federal and State levels.