Summary. There is now increased hardware support for improving the security and performance of privilege separation and compartmentalization techniques such as process-based sandboxes, trusted execution environments, and intra-address space compartments. We dub these "hetero-compartment environments" and observe that existing system stacks still assume single-compartment models (i.e. user space processes), leading to limitations in using, integrating, and monitoring heterogeneous compartments from a security and performance perspective. This project explores how we might deploy techniques such as fine-grained information flow control (DIFC) to allow developers to securely use and combine compartments, define security policies over shared system resources, and audit policy violations and perform digital forensics across hetero-compartments.

The primary focus of this work was conducting by Zahra Tarkhani in her PhD work on new hypervisor/OS/userspace interfaces for compartmentalization that could take advantage of TEE hardware (see Secure Programming with Dispersed Compartments).

Since that work has been completed, I've also been exploring the use of DIFC labels as part of Planetary Computing, in order to encrypt and control access to datasets across organisation boundaries. This work is still in the exploratory stages with Patrick Ferris and Michael Dales as of summer 2024.

Relevant Ideas

• Decentralised Capability-based Code Collaboration using Matrix
  by Samuel Wedgwood in 2022 (Completed, Part II).
• Secure Programming with Dispersed Compartments
  by Zahra Tarkhani in 2022 (Completed, PhD).
• Void Processes: Minimising privilege by default
  by Jake Hillion in 2021 (Completed, MPhil).
• Security analysis of brain-computing interfaces
  by Malachy O'Connor Brown and Oscar Hill cosupervised with Zahra Tarkhani and Lorena Qendro in 2021 (Completed).

Relevant Papers

[»] Enabling Lightweight Privilege Separation in Applications with MicroGuards Zahra Tarkhani and Anil Madhavapeddy In applied Cryptography and Network Security Workshops, Oct 2023 PDF   URL   BibTeX   DOI

[»] Information Flow Tracking for Heterogeneous Compartmentalized Software Zahra Tarkhani and Anil Madhavapeddy In proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses, Oct 2023 PDF   URL   BibTeX   DOI

[»] Enhancing the Security & Privacy of Wearable Brain-Computer Interfaces Zahra Tarkhani, Lorena Qendro, Malachy O'Connor Brown, Oscar Hill, Cecilia Mascolo and Anil Madhavapeddy Working paper at arXiv, Jan 2022 PDF   URL   BibTeX   DOI

[»] Snape: The Dark Art of Handling Heterogeneous Enclaves Zahra Tarkhani, Anil Madhavapeddy and Richard Mortier In proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking, Mar 2019 PDF   URL   BibTeX   DOI

[»] Exploring Compartmentalisation Hypotheses with SOAAP Khilan Gudka, Robert M Watson, Steven Hand, Ben Laurie and Anil Madhavapeddy In 2012 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Workshops, Sep 2012 PDF   URL   BibTeX   DOI

News Updates

Oct 2023. «» Paper on microgrounds memory API at ACNSW / «» Paper on DIFC Deluminator interface at RAID 2023.

Jan 2022. «» Preprint on security vulnerabilities in brain-computer interfaces.

Mar 2019. «» Paper on a framework to rearchitect applications for better TEE support at EdgeSys 2019.

Sep 2012. «» Paper on control flow analysis to break up applications into compartments.