Hello everyone! This week was very eventful as we had many exciting developments within Team 10… or as we now call ourselves: Banary.
At the start of the week, we met with our liaisons at RTX, Mr. Randall Brooks and Mr. Jose Romero-Mariona. After some introductions, we delved deep into the concept of what our project is about and possible approaches we could take to begin learning everything we need to bring this idea to life. The ultimate goal is to develop a program that reads compiled binary code and feeds it into an AI model to decipher what software weaknesses it may have. This will help developers in RTX find any vulnerabilities their code may have, which they could patch up so that malicious users do not take advantage of them to cause harm. It was a pleasure meeting Mr. Brooks and Mr. Romero-Mariona, and we can’t wait to meet with them again soon to reveal our team name and logo to them.
Speaking of our team name and logo – we finally decided on one. After some back and forth and taking some advice from our fellow IPPD students, we have decided on Banary. Banary is a portmanteau between “binary” and “canary.” Similarly to how canaries were kept in cages in coal mines to warn miners about dangerous carbon monoxide levels, Banary will be used to inform programmers about dangerous software weaknesses in their code. The logo exemplifies this with a golden canary at it’s center, surrounded by 1s and 0s to represent the binary element, as well as a locked shield to represent both the defense company we are working with and the cybersecurity element of our project. We believe the color choice and font design also works well with the themes of our logo, as canaries are yellow and the colors yellow and black represent “caution” and “security.”
Next week, we plan on meeting again with our RTX liaisons, as well as our coach and the other RTX IPPD team. We are also going to work on our Product Design Specifications, begin doing AI research on Hugging Face, and create our “Meet This Team” page.
Stay tuned for upcoming updates from Banary!