ASSURED INFORMATION SECURITY, INC. — Department of Defense STTR Phase II: HR001120S0019-001

Description

In the ACADIANA effort, we will address the inability of modern programming language, operating system, and architectural abstractions to provide a baseline level of adequate confidentiality protections. Until now, developers and users of software have largely relied on their programming language and operating system to ensure that confidential data isn’t leaked out of a process’ memory space or that malicious data won’t exploit the process’ code. However, recent architectural side-channel attacks have demonstrated that the baked-in default protection mechanisms provided to users of modern programming languages and operating systems are wholly inadequate to the task of providing adequate confidentiality guarantees. Under ACADIANA, we will overcome this problem by researching and developing a system that 1) augments a strictly-typed, memory safe programming language with a non-burdensome annotation domain-specific language for enabling / disabling runtime protections via the ABI, and 2) provides associated runtime protection mechanisms that enforce developer specified constraints as per annotations from the vantage point of an introspective hypervisor.