Bid document

Special Notice
Request for Information
Verification and Compliance Checking
for Natural-Language Network
Requirements (FastVacc)

DARPA-SN-27-13

October 29, 2026

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
Information Processing Techniques Office
675 North Randolph Street
Arlington, VA 22203-2114

DARPA-SN-27-13

REQUEST FOR INFORMATION (RFI) DESCRIPTION

Modern networks need to be reconfigured quickly in response to mission changes or emerging threats, but checking compliance with security requirements can take months. This creates a window in which adversaries may exploit vulnerabilities introduced by those changes. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) seeks information on approaches, tools and practices for closing that window by reducing, by 2-3 orders of magnitude, the time and cost of verifiable compliance checking. DARPA envisions a capability that would take as input two items: (a) a requirements document written in natural language and (b) the configurations in a concrete network. In an offline phase, it would reason about the requirements for inconsistency, redundancy and incompleteness, and output consistent, non-redundant and completed requirements. Then, it would check, in near realtime, whether the concrete configurations satisfy all of the requirements. In all cases, its output would be understandable by a human.

RFI BACKGROUND

Today, requirement documents such as commercial solutions for classified (CSfC) capability packages1, zero trust architecture (ZTA)2, and systems and communications protection3 are written in natural language. These consist of a description of the intended purpose, the design principles for accomplishing that purpose and a checklist of requirements and procedures to evaluate them against configurations. Analysts read the document, interpret what the requirements mean for a given network, identify the abstract structures in diagrams and raw configurations, and then execute the evaluation procedures against the network’s configuration. The limitations of this process arise from the inherent hardness of three challenges: natural language understanding, reasoning and evaluation.
Challenge 1: Natural Language Understanding
• Requirements documents can run into hundreds of pages producing hundreds of requirements. Often, they recursively reference other documents. • Requirements cannot be understood in isolation. Often, they are defined in terms of