seminar: Design Intent: A Principled Approach to Application Security
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Monday, September 14, 2009 |
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Design Intent: A Principled Approach to Application Security |
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Jonathan Aldrich, CyLab Researcher, Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science |
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12:00pm |
Talk Abstract
Although the state of application security practice has improved, much of what we do is an ad-hoc reaction to past problems. This approach is insufficient in the emerging security world, which is characterized by outsoucing, concurrency, and ever more creative attacks. A more principled approach to application ssecurity demands a focus on design intent: engineering information that describes how a system meets its safer language constructs, better library abstractions, or structured comments in source code. By localizing reasoning about global security properties, design intent supports more effective testing and reviews, and paves the way for a revolution in scalable, precise, and usable static analysis tools. I will describe emerging technologies that provide rigorous, design-intent based assurance about concurrency, secure composition, and architectural information-flow--and how the foundation of design intent can provide a more principled yet pragmatic approach to application security in the enterprise.
Speaker Bio
Jonathan Aldrich is Associate Professor in the School of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of CyLab. He is the
director of CMU's undergraduate minor program in Software Engineering,
and teaches courses in software engineering, analysis, and programming
languages. Dr. Aldrich's research achievements include verifying
correct implementation of an architectural design, modular formal
reasoning about code, and protocol specification and verification. For
his work on architecture, Aldrich received a 2006 NSF CAREER award and
the 2007 Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize, given annually for a significant
technical contribution to object-oriented programming. Aldrich holds a
bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Caltech and a Ph.D. from the
University of Washington.