Anil Madhavapeddy, Professor of Planetary Computing
The Case for Abstracting Security Policies
My first ever academic paper, written with the expert guidance of Alan Mycroft and my PhD colleagues Dave Scott and Richard Sharp! We worked on a system call policy language to help constrain application access to privileged resources, and implemented this on OpenBSD using systrace. The paper describing the declarative language was presented at SAM 2003 in Las Vegas.
"Untrusted code" is just as much a social problem as it
is a technical problem. Looking for a complete solution
is unrealistic: it is analogous to looking for a solution to
crime in general. With this in mind, we do not claim that
our proposed framework is a panacea. However, although
a number of security problems remain (e.g. covert channel
leakage), we claim that our system offers the potential to
raise the security level of existing general purpose operating systems significantly.
papers