There is a signup schedule for this event.

Type of Ta

lk: Colloquia

Speaker Name: Andrew Myers Associate Professor
<

br>Speaker Affiliation: Cornell University Ithaca New York

Date:
October 9 2006

Start Time: 4:30p.m.

Location: ACES 6.304

(ICES)

Host: CIAS & Freescale

Talk Title: Making distribute

d systems secure by construction

Talk Abstract:
The distributed
information systems we use every day are
becoming more complex and int

erconnected. Can we trust them
with our information? Many mechanisms ar

e available to ensure
information security: for example encryption va

rious cryptographic
protocols access control and replication. Curren

tly there
is no good way to check that complex distributed software
uses information securely even if we have the source code.
We curren

tly lack both sufficiently expressive ways to
specify information secur

ity requirements and sufficiently
accurate methods for checking them.<

br>
This talk describes a way to build systems that are secure
by co

nstruction. Programs are annotated with explicit security
policies spec

ifying the confidentiality integrity and
availability of information.
The compiler automatically
uses a combination of techniques to transfo

rm the source
code to run securely on the available host machines. The

compiler introduces quorum replication to satisfy both integrity
an

d availability policies. It introduces partitioning encryption
and on

e-way hashing to satisfy confidentiality policies.
To accommodate the n

eeds of realistic applications the
information security policies are a

lso enriched to support
new notions of ownership declassification rob

ustness
and erasure. These policies have precise semantics and
th

e construction process can be shown to enforce policies
in terms of the

se semantics.

Joint work with Lantian Zheng Steve Chong Andrei Sab

elfeld
and Steve Zdancewic.

Speaker Bio:
Andrew Myers is

an Associate Professor in the Computer Science
Department at Cornell Un

iversity in Ithaca NY. He received
his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science
from MIT in 1999.

His research interests i

nclude computer security programming
languages and distributed and pe

rsistent objects. His work
on computer security has focused on practica

l sound expressive
languages and systems for enforcing information se

curity.
The Jif programming language makes it possible to write
pro

grams which the compiler ensures are secure. The Polyglot
extensible co

mpiler framework is now widely used for programming
language research.<

br>
Andrew is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award an Alfred
P. Slo

an Fellowship a College of Engineering Abraham T.
C. Wong ''72 Excelle

nce in Teaching Award a George M. Sprowls
award for outstanding Ph.D.

thesis from MIT and a best
paper award for a paper in SOSP 2001.