All posts by Robert N. M. Watson

Research Assistants and Associates in OS, Compiler and CPU Security

Jobs, Open-source security, Operating systems, Processors

We are pleased to announce a job ad for two new research assistants or post-doctoral research associates working on our CTSRD Project, whose target research areas include OS, compiler, and CPU security. This is a joint project between the University of Cambridge’s Security, NetOS, and Computer Architecture research groups, as well as the Computer Science Laboratory at SRI International.

Research Assistants and Associates in OS, Compiler and CPU Security
Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for 18 months in the first instance.

We are seeking multiple Research Assistants and Post-Doctoral Research Associates to join the CTSRD Project, which is investigating fundamental improvements to CPU-architecture, operating-system (OS), program-analysis, and programming-language structure in support of computer security. The CTSRD Project is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and SRI International, and part of the DARPA CRASH research programme on clean-slate computer system design for security. More information may be found at:

This position will be an integral part of an international team of researchers spanning multiple institutions in academia and industry. Successful candidates will contribute to the larger research effort by performing system-software, compiler, and hardware implementation and experimentation, developing and evaluating novel hypotheses about refinements to the vertical hardware-software stack. Possible areas of responsibility include: modifying OS kernels (e.g., FreeBSD), adapting compiler suites (e.g., Clang/LLVM); extending an open-source Bluespec-based research-processor design (CHERI); supporting an early-adopter user community for open-source hardware and software; and improving the quality and performance of hardware-software prototypes. The successful candidate must be willing to travel in the UK and abroad engaging with downstream user communities.
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2013 Capsicum year in review

Academic papers, Open-source security, Operating systems, Security engineering

It’s been a busy year for Capsicum, practical capabilities for UNIX, so a year-end update seemed in order:

The FreeBSD Foundation and Google jointly funded a Capsicum Integration Project that took place throughout 2013 — described by Foundation project technical director Ed Maste in a recent blog article. Pawel Jakub Dawidek refined several Capsicum APIs, improving support for ioctls and increasing the number of supported capability rights for FreeBSD 10. He also developed Casper, a helper daemon that provides services (such as DNS, access to random numbers) to sandboxes — and can, itself, sandbox services. Casper is now in the FreeBSD 11.x development branch, enabled by default, and should appear in FreeBSD 10.1. The Google Open Source Program Office (OSPO) blog also carried a September 2013 article on their support for open-source security, featuring Capsicum.

Capsicum is enabled by default in the forthcoming FreeBSD 10.0 release — capability mode, capabilities, and process descriptors are available in the out-of-the-box GENERIC kernel. A number of system services use Capsicum to sandbox themselves — such as the DHCP client, high-availability storage daemon, audit log distribution daemon, but also command-line tools like kdump and tcpdump that handle risky data. Even more will appear in FreeBSD 10.1 next year, now that Casper is available.

David Drysdale at Google announced Capsicum for Linux, an adaptation of Linux to provide Capsicum’s capability mode and capabilities, in November 2013. David and Ben Laurie visited us in Cambridge multiple times this year to discuss the design and implementation, review newer Capsicum APIs, and talk about future directions. They hope to upstream this work to the Linux community. Joris Giovannangeli also announced an adaptation of Capsicum to DragonFlyBSD in October 2013.

Over the summer, Mariusz Zaborski and Daniel Peryolon were funded by Google Summer of Code to work on a variety of new Capsicum features and services, adapting core UNIX components and third-party applications to support sandboxing. For example, Mariusz looked at sandboxing BSD grep: if a vulnerability arises in grep’s regular-expression matching, why should processing a file of malicious origin yield full rights to your UNIX account?

In May 2013, our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by Bill Harris, published a paper at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (“Oakland”) on “Declarative, Temporal, and Practical Programming with Capabilities” — how to model program behaviour, and automatically transform some classes of applications to use Capsicum sandboxing. We were very pleased to lend a hand with this work, and feel the art of programming for compartmentalisation is a key research challenge. We also collaborated with folk at SRI and Google on a a workshop paper developing our ideas about application compartmentalisation, which appeared at the Security Protocols Workshop here in Cambridge in March 2013.

Google and the FreeBSD Foundation are committed to further work on Capsicum and its integration with applications, and research continues on how to apply Capsicum at several institutions including here at Cambridge. We hope to kick off a new batch of application adaptation in coming months — as well as integration with features such as DNSSEC. However, we also need your help in adapting applications to use Capsicum on systems that support it!

Google funding of open-source security projects

Open-source security, Operating systems, Security engineering

I was pleased to contribute to a recent blog article by Ben Laurie, a frequent collaborator with the Cambridge security group, on the Google Open Source Programs Office blog. We describe open-source security work OSPO has sponsored over the last couple of years, including our joint work on Capsicum, and its followup projects funded jointly by Google and the FreeBSD Foundation. He also talks about Google support for Certificate Transparency, OpenSSL, Tor, and Libpurple — projects focussed not just on communications security, but also communications privacy on the Internet.

Capsicum

Over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly (and painfully) apparent that ACLs and MAC, which were originally designed to protect expensive mainframes from their users, and the users from each other, are failing to secure modern cheap machines with single users who need protecting from the software they run.

Instead, we need fine-grained access control and strong sandboxing.
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Job ad: pre- and post-doctoral posts in processor, operating system, and compiler security

Jobs, Operating systems, Processors, Programmable logic, Programming languages, Security engineering

The CTSRD Project is advertising two posts in processor, operating system, and compiler security. The first is a research assistant position, suitable for candidates who may not have a research background, and the second is a post-doctoral research associate position suitable for candidates who have completed (or will shortly complete) a PhD in computer science or a related field.

The CTSRD Project is investigating fundamental improvements to CPU architecture, operating system (OS) design, and programming language structure in support of computer security. The project is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and SRI International, and part of the DARPA CRASH research programme on clean-slate computer system design.

These positions will be integral parts of an international team of researchers spanning multiple institutions across academia and industry. Successful candidate will provide support for the larger research effort by contributing to low-level hardware and system-software implementation and experimentation. Responsibilities will include extending Bluespec-based CHERI processor designs, modifying operating system kernels and compiler suites, administering test and development systems, as well as performing performance measurements. The position will also support and engage with early adopter communities for our open-source research platform in the UK and abroad.

Candidates should have strong experience with at least one of Bluespec HDL, OS kernel development (FreeBSD preferred), or compiler internals (LLVM preferred); strong experience with the C programming language and use of revision control in large, collaborative projects is essential. Some experience with computer security and formal methods is also recommended.

Further details on the two posts may be found in job ads NR27772 and NR27782. E-mail queries may be sent directly to Dr Robert N. M. Watson.

Both posts are intended to start on 8 July 2013; applications must be received by 9 May 2013.

CACM: A decade of OS access-control extensibility

Academic papers, Operating systems, Security engineering

Operating-system access control technology has undergone a remarkable transformation over the last fifteen years as appliance, embedded, and mobile device vendors transitioned from dedicated “embedded operating systems” to general-purpose ones — often based on open-source UNIX and Linux variants. Device vendors look to upstream operating system authors to provide the critical low-level software foundations for their products: network stacks, UI frameworks, application frameworks, etc. Increasingly, those expectations include security functionality — initially, features to prevent device bricking, but also to constrain potentially malicious code from third-party applications, which engages features from digital signatures to access control and sandboxing.

In a February 2013 Communications of the ACM article, A decade of OS access-control extensibility, I reflect on the central role of kernel access-control extensibility frameworks in supporting security localisation, the adaptation of operating-system security models to site-local or product-specific requirements. Similar to device driver stacks of the virtual file system (VFS), the goal is to allow third-party developers or integrators to extend base operating system security models without being exposed to unstable programming interfaces or the risks associated with less integrated techniques such as system-call interposition.

Case in point is the TrustedBSD MAC Framework, developed and deployed over the 2000s with support from DARPA and the US Navy, in collaboration with several industrial partners. In the article, I consider our original motivations, context, and design principles, but also track the transition process, which relied heavily on open source methodology and community, to a number of widely used products, including the open-source FreeBSD operating system, Apple’s Mac OS X and iOS operating systems, Juniper’s Junos router operating system, and nCircle’s IP360 product. I draw conclusions on things we got right (common infrastructure spanning models; tight integration with OS concurrency model) and wrong (omitting OS privilege model extension; not providing an application author identity model).

Throughout, the diversity of approaches and models suggests an argument for domain-specific policy models that respond to local tradeoffs between performance, functionality, complexity, and security, rather than a single policy model to rule them all. I also emphasise the importance of planning for long-term sustainability for research products — critical to adoption, especially via open source, but also frequently overlooked in academic research.

An open-access (and slightly extended) version of the article can be found on ACM Queue.

Interviews on the clean-slate design argument

News coverage, Operating systems, Processors, Security engineering

Over the past two years, Peter G. Neumann and I, along with a host of collaborators at SRI International and the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, have been pursuing CTSRD, a joint computer-security research project exploring fundamental revisions to CPU design, operating systems, and application program structure. Recently we’ve been talking about the social, economic, and technical context for that work in a series of media interviews, including one with ACM Queue on research into the hardware-software interface posted previously.

A key aspect to our argument is that the computer industry has been pursuing a strategy of hill climbing with respect to security; if we were willing to take a step back and revisit some of our more fundamental design choices, learning from longer-term security research over the last forty years, then we might be able to break aspects of the asymmetry driving the current arms race between attackers and defenders. This clean-slate argument doesn’t mean we need to throw everything away, but does suggest that more radical change is required than is being widely considered, as we explore in two further interviews:

CFP: Runtime Environments, Systems, Layering and Virtualized Environments (RESoLVE 2013)

Call for papers, Operating systems, Processors, Programming languages

This year, we presented two papers at RESoLVE 2012 relating to the structure of operating systems and hardware, one focused on CPU instruction set security features out of our CTSRD project, and another on efficient and reconfigurable communications in data centres out of our MRC2 project.

I’m pleased to announce the Call for Papers for RESoLVE 2013, a workshop (co-located with ASPLOS 2013) that brings together researchers in both the OS and language level virtual machine communities to exchange ideas and experiences, and to discuss how these separate layers can take advantage of each others’ services. This has a particular interest to the security community, who both want to build, and build on, security properties spanning hardware protection (e.g., VMs) and language-level protection.

Runtime Environments, Systems, Layering and Virtualized Environments
(RESoLVE 2013)

ASPLOS 2013 Workshop, Houston, Texas, USA
March 16, 2013

Introduction

Today’s applications typically target high-level runtime systems and frameworks. At the same time, the operating systems on which they run are themselves increasingly being deployed on top of (hardware) virtual machines. These trends are enabling applications to be written, tested, and deployed more quickly, while simplifying tasks such as checkpointing, providing fault-tolerance, enabling data and computation migration, and making better, more power-efficient use of hardware infrastructure.

However, much current work on virtualization still focuses on running unmodified legacy systems and most higher-level runtime systems ignore the fact that they are deployed in virtual environments. The workshop on Runtime Environments, Systems, Layering, and Virtualized Environments (RESoLVE 2013) aims to brings together researchers in both the OS and language level virtual machine communities to exchange ideas and experiences and to discuss how these separate layers can take advantage of each others’ services.

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ACM Queue interview on research into the hardware-software interface

News coverage, Operating systems, Processors, Programming languages

ACM Queue has posted my August 2012 interview on research into the hardware-software interface. We discuss the importance of a whole-stack view in addressing contemporary application security problems, which are often grounded in how we represent and execute software over lower-level substrates. We need to consider CPU design, operating systems, programming languages, applications, and formal methods — which requires building collaborations that span traditional silos in computer science research. I also consider the impact of open source on software security research methodology, and how we might extend those ideas to CPU research. A motivation for this investigation is our experimental CHERI hybrid capability processor, part of the CTSRD Project, a long-term research collaboration between the security, operating systems, and computer architecture groups at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and the systems and formal methods groups SRI International Computer Science Laboratory.

Call for papers: Workshop on Adaptive Host and Network Security

Call for papers, Operating systems, Security engineering

Stu Wagner, Bob Laddaga, and I are pleased to announce the call for papers for a new Workshop on Adaptive Host and Network Security, to take place at the Sixth IEEE Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems in September 2012 in Lyon, France.

Over the past decade the threat of cyber attacks on critical commercial and government infrastructure has been growing at an alarming rate to a point where it is now considered to be a major threat in the world. Current approaches to cyber security involve building fast-growing multi-million line systems that attempt to detect and remove attacking software. Meanwhile, cyber exploits continue to multiply in number, but their size continues to be a couple of hundred lines of code. This disparity of effort means that the current defensive approaches to cyber security can at best fight a holding action. The workshop is intended to explore game-changing approaches to cyber security that focus on adaptation. There is a clear need to develop systems at both the host level and the network level to actively adapt to cyber attacks and to provide greater protection for networked computation at all levels. Topic of interest include:

  • Protecting the host
  • New OS models for secure hosts
  • Combining proof, model checking and dynamic monitoring techniques for host security
  • Meta-level control and monitoring of networks
  • Use of feedback mechanisms in network operations
  • Self-monitoring and self-explaining network systems
  • Self-adaptive and autonomic networking
  • Centralized versus distributed network control
  • Measurement of network properties in support of self evaluation
  • Programming language abstractions to support security
  • Computational models of network security
  • Self healing networks
  • Learning in adaptive networks
  • Dynamically reprogrammable switches
  • The use of a Policy-based Network Management system to build self-adaptively secure networks

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Job ad: post-doctoral researcher in security, operating systems, computer architecture

Jobs, Operating systems, Processors, Programming languages

We are pleased to announce a job opening at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory for a post-doctoral researcher working in the areas of security, operating systems, and computer architecture.

Research Associate in compiler-assisted instrumentation of operating system kernels
University of Cambridge – Faculty of Computer Science and Technology
Salary: £27,578-£35,938 pa

The funds for this post are available for up to two years:

We are seeking a Post-doctoral Research Associate to join the CTSRD and MRC2 projects, which are investigating fundamental revisions to CPU architecture, operating system (OS), programming language, and networking structures in support of computer security. The two projects are collaborations between the University of Cambridge and SRI International, and part of the DARPA CRASH and MRC research programmes on clean-slate computer system design.

This position will be an integral part of an international team of researchers spanning multiple institutions across academia and industry. The successful candidate will contribute to low-level aspects of system software: compilers, language run-times, and OS kernels. Responsibilities will include researching the application of novel dynamic instrumentation techniques to C-language operating systems and applications, including adaptation of the FreeBSD kernel and LLVM compiler suite, and evaluation of the resulting system.

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