Security mechanisms for systems programming languages, such as fine-grained memory protection for C/C++, authorize operations at runtime using access rights associated with objects and pointers. The cost of such fine-grained capability-based security models is dominated by metadata updates and lookups, making efficient metadata management the key for minimizing performance impact. Existing approaches reduce metadata management overheads by sacrificing precision, breaking binary compatibility by changing object memory layout, or wasting space with excessive alignment or large shadow memory spaces.

Concurrent programming errors arise when threads share data incorrectly. Programmers often avoid these errors by using synchronization to enforce a simple ownership policy: data is either owned exclusively by a thread that can read or write the data, or it is read owned by a set of threads that can read but not write the data. Unfortunately, incorrect synchronization often fails to enforce these policies and memory errors in languages like C and C++ can violate these policies even when synchronization is correct.

Bugs in kernel extensions remain one of the main causes of poor operating system reliability despite proposed techniques that isolate extensions in separate protection domains to contain faults. We believe that previous fault isolation techniques are not widely used because they cannot isolate existing kernel extensions with low overhead on standard hardware. This is a hard problem because these extensions communicate with the kernel using a complex interface and they communicate frequently. We present BGI (Byte-Granularity Isolation), a new software fault isolation technique that addresses this problem. BGI uses efficient byte-granularity memory protection to isolate kernel extensions in separate protection domains that share the same address space. BGI ensures type safety for kernel objects and it can detect common types of errors inside domains. Our results show that BGI is practical: it can isolate Windows drivers without requiring changes to the source code and it introduces a CPU overhead between 0 and 16%. BGI can also find bugs during driver testing. We found 28 new bugs in widely used Windows drivers.

Attacks often exploit memory errors to gain control over the execution of vulnerable programs. These attacks remain a serious problem despite previous research on techniques to prevent them. We present write integrity testing (WIT), a new technique that provides practical protection from these attacks. WIT uses points-to analysis at compile time to compute the control-flow graph and the set of objects that can be written by each instruction in the program. Then it generates code instrumented to prevent instructions from modifying objects that are not in the set computed by the static analysis, and to ensure that indirect control transfers are allowed by the control-flow graph. To improve coverage where the analysis is not precise enough, WIT inserts small guards between the original program objects. We describe an efficient implementation with optimizations to reduce space and time overhead. This implementation can be used in practice because it compiles C and C++ programs without modifications, it has high coverage with no false positives, and it has low overhead. WIT's average runtime overhead is only 7% across a set of CPU intensive benchmarks and it is negligible when IO is the bottleneck.

Most of the recent work on Web security focuses on preventing attacks that directly harm the browser’s host machine and user. In this paper we attempt to quantify the threat of browsers being indirectly misused for attacking third parties. Specifically, we look at how the existing Web infrastructure (e.g., the languages, protocols, and security policies) can be exploited by malicious or subverted Web sites to remotely instruct browsers to orchestrate actions including denial of service attacks, worm propagation, and reconnaissance scans. We show that attackers are able to create powerful botnet-like infrastructures that can cause significant damage. We explore the effectiveness of countermeasures including anomaly detection and more fine-grained browser security policies.

Most of the recent work on Web security focuses on preventing attacks that directly harm the browser's host machine and user. In this paper we attempt to quantify the threat of browsers being indirectly misused for attacking third parties. Specifically, we look at how the existing Web infrastructure (e.g., the languages, protocols, and security policies) can be exploited by malicious Web sites to remotely instruct browsers to orchestrate actions including denial of service attacks, worm propagation and reconnaissance scans. We show that, depending mostly on the popularity of a malicious Web site and user browsing patterns, attackers are able to create powerful botnet-like infrastructures that can cause significant damage. We explore the effectiveness of countermeasures including anomaly detection and more fine-grained browser security policies.

Recent cybersecurity incidents suggest that Internet worms can spread so fast that in-time human-mediated reaction is not possible, and therefore initial response to cyberattacks has to be automated. The first step towards combating new unknown worms is to be able to detect and identify them at the first stages of their spread. In this paper, we present a novel method for detecting new worms based on identifying similar packet contents directed to multiple destination hosts. We evaluate our method using real traffic traces that contain real worms. Our results suggest that our approach is able to identify novel worms while at the same time the generated false alarms reach as low as zero percent.