Project "FreeBSD – AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery"

This service agreement concerns the FOSS operating system FreeBSD and covers research into how artificial intelligence can strengthen open source maintenance, focusing on the FreeBSD Security Team's process of finding, validating, patching, and disclosing vulnerabilities and producing Security Advisories. FreeBSD is a modern, Unix-like operating system released under a permissive licence. As part of two work packages, the contract covers a code review workflow that works with both hosted commercial models and models the project runs itself, a tested method for discovering vulnerabilities that produces findings developers can act on, improved ways of validating and fixing what is found, work on existing and prototype tools that detect defects in the kernel, and an evaluation of these models in automated testing, and the publication of the methods, findings, and lessons learned so that other open source projects can reproduce and adapt them.

The aim of this service is to establish a proactive workflow, compatible with free and open source software terms, that improves the speed and quality of repairing and maintaining without overwhelming maintainers.