Publications
Tagged As
Exploiting temporal vulnerabilities for unauthorized access in intent-based networking
Summary
Summary
Intent-based networking (IBN) enables network administrators to express high-level goals and network policies without needing to specify low-level forwarding configurations, topologies, or protocols. Administrators can define intents that capture the overall behavior they want from the network, and an IBN controller compiles such intents into low-level configurations that get installed...
Holding the high ground: Defending satellites from cyber attack
Summary
Summary
MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the Space Cyber-Resiliency group at Air Force Research Laboratory-Space Vehicles Directorate have prototyped a practical, operationally capable and secure-by-design spaceflight software platform called Cyber-Hardened Satellite Software (CHSS) for building space mission applications with security, recoverability and performance as first-class system design priorities. Following a successful evaluation...
Cross-language attacks
Summary
Summary
Memory corruption attacks against unsafe programming languages like C/C++ have been a major threat to computer systems for multiple decades. Various sanitizers and runtime exploit mitigation techniques have been shown to only provide partial protection at best. Recently developed ‘safe’ programming languages such as Rust and Go hold the promise...
Preventing Kernel Hacks with HAKCs
Summary
Summary
Commodity operating system kernels remain monolithic for practical and historical reasons. All kernel code shares a single address space, executes with elevated processor privileges, and has largely unhindered access to all data, including data irrelevant to the completion of a specific task. Applying the principle of least privilege, which limits...
Keeping Safe Rust safe with Galeed
Summary
Summary
Rust is a programming language that simultaneously offers high performance and strong security guarantees. Safe Rust (i.e., Rust code that does not use the unsafe keyword) is memory and type safe. However, these guarantees are violated when safe Rust interacts with unsafe code, most notably code written in other programming...
Practical principle of least privilege for secure embedded systems
Summary
Summary
Many embedded systems have evolved from simple bare-metal control systems to highly complex network-connected systems. These systems increasingly demand rich and feature-full operating-systems (OS) functionalities. Furthermore, the network connectedness offers attack vectors that require stronger security designs. To that end, this paper defines a prototypical RTOS API called Patina that...
A cybersecurity moonshot
Summary
Summary
Cybersecurity needs radical rethinking to change its current landscape. This article charts a vision for a cybersecurity moonshot based on radical but feasible technologies that can prevent the largest classes of vulnerabilities in modern systems.
More than a fair share: Network Data Remanence attacks against secret sharing-based schemes
Summary
Summary
With progress toward a practical quantum computer has come an increasingly rapid search for quantum-safe, secure communication schemes that do not rely on discrete logarithm or factorization problems. One such encryption scheme, Multi-path Switching with Secret Sharing (MSSS), combines secret sharing with multi-path switching to achieve security as long as...
Control systems need software security too: cyber-physical systems and safety-critical application domains must adopt widespread effective software defenses
Summary
Summary
Low-level embedded control systems are increasingly being targeted by adversaries, and there is a strong need for stronger software defenses for such systems. The cyber-physical nature of such systems impose real-time performance constraints not seen in enterprise computing systems, and such constraints fundamentally alter how software defenses should be designed...
One giant leap for computer security
Summary
Summary
Today's computer systems trace their roots to an era of trusted users and highly constrained hardware; thus, their designs fundamentally emphasize performance and discount security. This article presents a vision for how small steps using existing technologies can be combined into one giant leap for computer security.