September 11, 2025
Our society increasingly relies upon legacy systems, many of which contain cybersecurity vulnerabilities. In many situations, the original source code, tool chain, or development environment to build the software from source has been lost or no longer functions. In such scenarios, binary micropatching, or the process of surgically modifying or inserting new assembly instructions, is the only available option. With current development tools micropatching is error prone, and can easily lead to broken programs and unintended effects. In this talk we will discuss cozy, a tool developed at Draper under DARPA AMP for analyzing and visualizing differences between two versions of software binaries. cozy can be used to increase assurance that a micropatch correctly fixes erroneous behavior, while leaving other behavior untouched.
About Caleb Helbling
Caleb Helbling is currently a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Draper, a non-profit research and development laboratory located in Cambridge, MA. He graduated with a BS in CS from Tufts University in 2016 and an MS in CS from Purdue University in 2023. His primary area of expertise is programming language theory, particularly in the areas of domain specific languages and analysis of binary software. Outside of his full time job at Draper he enjoys working on game development, and is planning on releasing a title on the Steam marketplace in 2026.