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At the direction of Governor Phil Scott, the Vermont National Guard rapidly erected a 400-bed alternative healthcare facility field hospital to increase the state’s medical capacity early in the COVID-19 pandemic when information was limited and cases were rapidly rising across the country. This case study reviews the preparation and management of the alternative healthcare facility’s first COVID-19-positive patient assigned to the 50-bed COVID-19 isolation ward. Despite austere conditions with rudimentary improvements to a nonstandard facility, the ad hoc team composed entirely of members of the Vermont National Guard successfully oversaw patient care from admission to discharge while maintaining a zero-percent transmission rate to staff. While the local civilian medical infrastructure was never overwhelmed and patient census at the facility remained low, this case study highlights the capability of the National Guard enterprise as a community response to pandemic crises.

We discuss the potential for significant reduction in size and complexity of verification tasks for input-handling software when such software is constructed according to LangSec principles, i.e., is designed as a recognizer for a particular language of valid inputs and is compiled for a suitably limited computational model no stronger than needed for the recognition task. We introduce Crema, a programming language and restricted execution environment of sub-Turing power, and conduct a case study to estimate and compare the respective sizes of verification tasks for the qmail SMTP parsing code fragments when executed natively vs in Crema-using LLVM and KLEE. We also study the application of the same principles to the verification of reference monitors.

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MoRE, or Measurement of Running Executables, was a DARPA Cyber Fast Track effort to study the feasibility of utilizing x86 translation look-aside buffer (TLB) splitting techniques for realizing periodic measurements of running and dynamically changing applications. Currently, there are certain applications that interleave code and data that cannot be meaningfully measured during execution due to their polymorphic/dynamically changing nature. This lack of meaningful measurement is a weakness in trusted computing MoRE aimed to, and succeeded to address.