AppControl: Enforcing Application Behaviour through Type-Based Constraints (EP/V000462/1)
About this project
This project was supported the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) Programme delivered by UKRI to support the DSbD ecosystem (EPSRC EP/V000462/1, and in partner with the University of Glasgow and Imperial College London.
Key Ideas
To secure program interaction we need to go beyond access privileges and ensure that a program follows the intended behavioural specification. Because Capabilities say nothing about program behaviour, we will also use Behavioural Types to capture the physical and behavioural structure of application interfaces.
- Behavioural typing supports compile-time checking of program behaviour when its implementation is known, and runtime checking of program behaviour when it is not known.
- We will leverage CHERI’s Capabilities to ensure that behavioural types are not modified by parties unknown.
Debugging Infrastructure
- Design-by-specification will ensure correctness of behaviour, provided that the specification is correct. Debugging a specification-based system, demands the ability to debug the specification at run-time.
- Debugging system will include continuous diagnostics tools that allow to evaluate the system operation continuously and can identify hardware failure or unusual system behaviour.
News
- 10/2022: We presented our poster in Digital Security by Design (DSbD) - All Hands networking meeting at Grand Station, Sun St, Wolverhampton.
- 08/2022: Our paper “Benchmark Tool for Detecting Anomalous Program Behaviour on Embedded Devices” has been accepted by the CAI-2022 held in conjunction with IEEE TrustCom-2022.
- 04/2022: We presented our poster in Digital Security by Design (DSbD) - All Hands networking meeting at 116 Pall Mall, London.
- 09/2021: Our paper “Design and Implementation of a RISC V Processor on FPGA” has been accepted by the 17th International Conference on Mobility, Sensing and Networking MSN 2021
- 09/2021: We are presenting at DSbD All Hands event