Secure Program Partitioning

Abstract

A challenging unsolved security problem is how to specify and enforce system-wide security policies; this problem is even more acute in distributed systems with mutual distrust. Secure program partitioning is a new way to enforce policies for data confidentiality and integrity in such an environment. In this approach, programs annotated with security specifications are statically checked and then transformed by the compiler to run securely on a distributed system with untrusted hosts. The code and data of the computation are partitioned and replicated across the available hosts in accordance with the security specification, and the compiler automatically generates secure run-time protocols for communication among the replicated code partitions. Programs such as games and auctions can be automatically transformed to run securely.

Andrew Myers is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1999. His research interests include computer security, programming languages, and distributed object systems. His recent work has focused on making language-based information flow an expressive and practical way to build secure systems.