HYDRA is an automated mechanism to repair code in response to successful attacks. Given a set of malicious inputs that include the attack and a set of benign inputs that do not, along with an ability to test the victim application with these labelled inputs, HYDRA quickly provides rank ordered patches to close the exploited vulnerability. HYDRA also produces human-readable summaries of its findings and repair actions to aid the manual vulnerability mitigation process. We tested HYDRA using 8 zero-days, HYDRA produced patches that stopped the attacks in all 8 cases and preserved application functionality in 7 of the 8 cases.

A3 is an execution management environment that aims to make network-facing applications and services resilient against zero-day attacks. A3 recently underwent two adversarial evaluations of its defensive capabilities. In one, A3 defended an App Store used in a Capture the Flag (CTF) tournament, and in the other, a tactically relevant network service in a red team exercise. This paper describes the A3 defensive technologies evaluated, the evaluation results, and the broader lessons learned about evaluations for technologies that seek to protect critical systems from zero-day attacks.

Reliable isolation of malicious application inputs is necessary for preventing the future success of an observed novel attack after the initial incident. In this paper we describe, measure and analyze, Input-Reduction, a technique that can quickly isolate malicious external inputs that embody unforeseen and potentially novel attacks, from other benign application inputs. The Input-Reduction technique is integrated into an advanced, security-focused, and adaptive execution environment that automates diagnosis and repair. In experiments we show that Input-Reduction is highly accurate and efficient in isolating attack inputs and determining casual relations between inputs. We also measure and show that the cost incurred by key services that support reliable reproduction and fast attack isolation is reasonable in the adaptive execution environment.

We present temporal milestones for hierarchical task networks to enable the complex synchronization of tasks. A temporal milestone of a task is an intermediate event that occurs during the execution of a complex task, e.g., the start time, the end time or a milestone of any of its subtasks. Unlike landmark variables, introduced in existing work, temporal milestones respect the task abstraction boundaries and preserve structural properties enabling much more efficient reasoning. Furthermore, temporal milestones are as expressive as landmark variables. We provide analytical and empirical evidence to support these claims.

In an environment increasingly saturated with computing devices, it is desirable for some services to be distributed, executing via local interactions between devices. Creating fast, flexible and dynamic distributed services requires a general model of function calls distributed over space–time. Prior models, however, have either depended strongly on large-scale Internet infrastructure or have restrictions in the scope or resolution of space–time for inputs, outputs or evaluation of the function. We address this by providing a formal general model of function calls over space–time. We then fully realize a practical model of space–time function calls, based in the Proto language and present both theoretical and empirical results. Finally, we show how our results for Proto generalize into implications for any model of distributed computing.