14 DAY TRIAL // The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a United States government agency that creates new tech from the military, announces that it is launching a number of games under the Verigames brand that will help improve overall software security.
The games and their descriptions are:
CircuitBot - Link up a team of robots to carry out a mission. Flow Jam - Analyze and adjust a cable network to maximize its flow. Ghost Map - Free your mind by finding a path through a brain network. StormBound - Unweave the windstorm into patterns of streaming symbols. Xylem - Catalog species of plants using mathematical formulas.
There’s a website where all of them can be played.
All the titles are only available for gamers who are older than 18 because of the volunteer research participants clause for all DARPA projects.
The five experiences are designed to use the actions of the player to execute the formal verification of software.
Until now, the same tasks were performed by specially trained engineers who manually searched through software to eliminate vulnerabilities, which was costly and slow.
DARPA is basically using input from gamers that is then translated into program annotations that generate mathematical proofs to verify that certain classes of flaws are not included in programs written using C or Java.
The government organization is crowdsourcing the detection of big software issues in order to make programs more secure for the general public.
Drew Dean, DARPA program manager, states in the official announcement that, “We’re seeing if we can take really hard math problems and map them onto interesting, attractive puzzle games that online players will solve for fun. By leveraging players’ intelligence and ingenuity on a broad scale, we hope to reduce security analysts’ workloads and fundamentally improve the availability of formal verification.”
It will be interesting to whether the idea of playing games to improve software security is a hit with the audience.