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The US military agency responsible for developing new technologies plans to embark on an effort to rewrite significant volumes of C code by funding a new research challenge to create an automated translator capable of converting old C code with function written in the security-focused Rust language.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will hold a workshop, known as Proposers Day, on Aug. 26 to outline its vision for the Translating All C to Rust (TRACTOR) project. The effort calls for academic and industry research groups to compete to create a system that can turn C code into idiomatic — that is, using native features — Rust code. The project’s ultimate goal is to provide tools so that any organization with large volumes of software written in C can convert that code to Rust and eliminate the memory-safety errors that account for a large source of software vulnerabilities.

Without an automated system, developers are unlikely to take on the task, says Dan Wallach, program manager in DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O).

Three new encryption algorithms to bolster global cybersecurity efforts against future attacks using quantum technologies were published today by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The new standards are designed for two tasks: general encryption and digital signatures.

These new standards are the culmination of an eight-year effort from the agency to tap the best minds in cybersecurity to devise the next generation of cryptography strong enough to withstand quantum computers. Experts expect quantum computers capable of breaking current current cryptographic algorithms within a decade. The new standards, the first released by NIST’s post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization project, are published on the department’s website. The documents contain the algorithms’ computer code, instructions for how to implement them in products and in encryption systems, and use cases for each.

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that programming robots to create their own teams and voluntarily wait for their teammates results in faster task completion, with the potential to improve manufacturing, agriculture and warehouse automation. The study is published in 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

This research was recognized as a finalist for Best Paper Award on Multi-Robot Systems at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2024.

“There’s a long history of debate on whether we want to build a single, powerful humanoid robot that can do all the jobs, or we have a team of robots that can collaborate,” says one of the study authors, Hao Zhang, associate professor at the UMass Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences and director of the Human-Centered Robotics Lab.