The PDF Association serves as an industry partner in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded Safe Documents (SafeDocs) program, with Peter Wyatt working on behalf of the PDF industry as the PDF Principal Investigator. The underlying SafeDocs’ approach is that of ‘language-theoretic security’ (LangSec) which applies numerous formal approaches to create cyber-security-aware data definitions for various file formats that lead to verifiably safe parsers.
In just the first 12 months of the SafeDocs research program, in addition to pushing the boundaries and extending LangSec theory, a number of intermediate but industry-relevant outcomes have continued to occur. This talk will walk through some of these outcomes, explain how they came about, how they may evolve, and how they can be useful to the PDF industry. Feedback on these outcomes is also sought to ensure that future research work is aligned with the real needs of the PDF industry.