2011 Bike Commute Challenge

Each September, the Portland-based Bicycle Transportation Alliance sponsors its Bike Commute Challenge, which promotes biking to work via a friendly team competition.

Team Galois had a 29.1% commute rate this year. Nearly three out of every ten commutes by Galois employees in September were taken by bicycle. That's a company record:

• 2007: 17.1%
• 2008: 22.9%
• 2009: 15.2%
• 2010: 26.4%
• 2011: 29.1%

We at Galois take pride in our workplace, which includes an office complete with bike racks, shower room, and a walk-in closet for hanging bike clothes (which sometime get a bit soggy in the Pacific Northwest). We were aided by a beautiful, dry September that let riders in the Portland area and along the Willamette Valley log over 1.3 million miles during this year's Challenge.

Update (Oct 9): According to the BTA's final results, Galois placed 25th out of 285 teams in the Business and Non-Profits With 25-99 Employees category.

Galois to Help DARPA PROCEED to Change the Game

Portland, OR (April 11, 2011) - The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded up to $4.7M to Galois, Inc., as research integrator for the PROCEED program (Programming Computation on Encrypted Data) whose goal is to make it feasible to execute programs on encrypted data without having to decrypt the data first. 

DARPA Program Manager Dr. Drew Dean has assembled a diverse group of researchers on PROCEED with the challenging goal of making fundamental progress in the science and mathematics of computing on encrypted data, while at the same time increasing the efficiency of implementations of the new techniques by several orders of magnitude. The researchers are working at many different levels of abstraction: on the design of programming languages that support encrypted data; on building efficient libraries of operations over encrypted data structures; on compilation techniques that exploit programmable hardware; and on fundamental breakthroughs in the cryptographic approach itself. 

Over the next four years, Galois will draw the many threads of research together into a coherent whole. Galois brings extensive existing infrastructure and technological support for multi-use cryptography compilation and analysis, and a decade of experience supporting and connecting cryptographers in research, government, and industry. 

To meet the critical technical challenge of a shared technical infrastructure, Galois offers the Cryptol® tool suite, leveraging the existing framework for specifying, designing, implementing, and verifying cryptographic algorithms for a variety of hardware and software platforms. The toolset will be extended to showcase the breakthroughs in homomorphic encryption produced across the PROCEED research team. 

About Galois: Galois (http://www.galois.com/) was founded in 1999 to provide a unique R&D capability for government and commercial clients. Galois applies revolutionary mathematical, computer science and engineering approaches to solve critical problems in software security, safety, privacy and performance. Galois has been instrumental in bringing cutting edge research into practice for the DoD, DoE, Intelligence, pharmaceutical and aerospace communities. 

Contact: Leah Daniels leah@galois.com 503/808-7152 

Approved for Public Release, Distribution Unlimited

Galois awarded Navy/ONR project in binary instrumentation and monitoring

Galois has been selected by the Office of Naval Research for a Phase 1 Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) award, to develop a viable real-time software execution monitoring system to protect programs against errors, regardless of the programming language the software is written in.

The approach will be based on instrumentation of binaries via the LLVM compiler framework. This effort builds on Galois' expertise in runtime monitoring and program analysis (such as the ASA tool and the CoPilot monitoring language).

Contact Leah Daniels at 503-808-7152 for more information.

Galois CEO Testifies Before U.S. Congress

Galois' CEO, Laura McKinney, was asked to testify before the U.S. Congress Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation on the role of small business in innovation and job creation. The hearing was specifically assessing the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Technology Transfer Research (STTR) programs. Laura provided background on Galois as a small business that transforms computer science research into practice to address urgent problems with safety and security software. She shared with the committee our experience as a technology transition company:

• Expect the unexpected in technology transition. It is extremely difficult to predict when and where ultimate value of technology invention will be realized.


• Relevance and value comes from being strongly connected with the mission and needs of operational entities.


• Technology transition comes incrementally, and is built through a series of contributions by an entire eco-system of collaborators.

Laura went on to highlight the impact of the SBIR program on Oregon and the nation specifically from Galois’ participation:

• Increased Oregon access to broader US government business.


• Technology and market opportunities generated for new ventures.


• Exposure for companies like Galois to real and current government needs.


• Increased commercialization capability within Galois.


• Research developed for one agency spread to impact other agencies.


• Global cybersecurity research capabilities brought to bear on national needs.

She ended her testimony by providing the following suggested improvements:

• Augment success metrics for Phase-III to include evaluation of successful open source release.


• Incrementally increase Phase-I award size to enable better assessment of results in consideration of Phase-II.


• Accelerate Phase-I to Phase-II selection to match the pace of software technology change.


• Provide more support to Technical Points of Contact in the administration and guidance in SBIRs.


• Encourage TPOCs to provide connections with interested acquisition programs.

Laura did a great job representing Galois' belief that the SBIR program is successful, both for fostering the innovation and jobs engine of small businesses, and for nurturing breakthrough technologies to the benefit of the government and wider economy. Click here to view the archived webcast of the hearing and click here to read Laura's entire written testimony.

Galois awarded AFRL/OSD project in hardware security

Galois has been selected by AFRL/OSD for a Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) award to develop countermeasures against malicious hardware. In this project, Galois will address the class of hardware threats known as "deterministically triggered trojans", and develop tools that inhibit malicious hardware activation by applying attack incompatibility techniques.

This effort builds on Galois' experience in both the Active Defense and Domain Specific Language research programs.

For more information, please contact the lead investigator, David Burke