DC SIGAda
Program for Thursday, 8 May 2003

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of Cryptographic Source Code

This paper describes a case study evaluating the efficacy of utilizing the published, printed copy of cryptographic source codes (Pretty Good Privacy) to reproduce the electronic equivalent source code using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) solutions. Accuracy measurements of the resulting OCR outputs at various scanning resolutions and estimates of the additional effort required to correct the output are provided for approximately 100 pages of training material. Correlation of these estimates against one of six volumes of the source code is provided.

You're probably wondering where Ada comes in, I suppose - the whole thing is written in Ada...

The presentation will include the design decisions made throughout the development. The rationale for these design decisions could be applicable and valuable to other software developments.

Karl Nyberg is President of Grebyn Corporation and has been active in the Ada industry since the early 1980s. He was employed at Verdix Corporation (where he did network computer security in addition to work on the Ada side of the company), and has been consulting in Ada since 1985. Some of his more notable projects have been in the area of formal verification, expert systems and both operating systems and applications interfaces. He was a member of the Ada 9X Requirements Team at IDA, of the Federal Advisory Board on Ada, provided a special report to the SEI on Ada 9X topics and consulted for numerous Ada procurements and programs (SDI, MCTSSA, WIS Workstation, RCAS, and IADS). He is also widely recognized for his Ada publications, particularly the Annotated Ada (83) Reference Manual, which integrated the text of the ISO Ada Rapporteur Group's AIs into the text of the Ada 83 standard. He received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering and his Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MITRE2 is on Colshire Drive just inside the beltway south of Route 123. Colshire Road is known as "Scotts Xing" on the North side of Route 123.

Colshire Road is located on Route 123, East of I-495 and West of the Dulles Access Highway.

• Going Northbound on 123 from I-495, Colshire Road is located 2 stoplights on the right.
• Going Southbound on 123 from the Dulles Access Highway, Colshire Road is located at the first stoplight on the left.

From I-495 south of Route 123 (Dolley Madison Boulevard):

From Dulles Access Toll Road or I-495 north of the Dulles Access Toll Road:

To obtain a map of MITRE2 Building and the MITRE Campus, visit =>
http://www.acm.org/sigada/locals/dc/Directions_MITRE2.html.

At the Baltimore SIGAda meeting on 8 April 2003, John Warther and Gordon Uchenick gave an excellent presentation titled: High Reliability, Safety, and Secure Solutions for Embedded Developers. Slides from his presentation are available online as a Powerpoint Presentation at http://www.acm.org/sigada/locals/dc/200304_Gordon_Uchenick.ppt (ppt, 2.097 MB). The much requested jpg image of the X-38 Space Station Lifeboat With caption "When Ctrl-Alt-Delete is Not an Option" is available at: http://www.acm.org/sigada/locals/dc/X38.jpg JPG File (jpg, 159 KB).

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