Aaron Blankstein will present his research seminar/general exam on Thursday January 24 at Noon in Room 402. The members of his committee are: Michael Freedman (advisor), Ed Felten, and Vivek Pai. Everyone is invited to attend his talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. His abstract and reading list follow below. ----- Original Message ----- Abstract: In many client-facing applications, a vulnerability in any portion can compromise the entire application. In this talk, I describe the design and implementation of Passe, a web framework that provides integrity and confidentiality guarantees for existing applications. Passe automatically splits (previously single-process) web applications into sandboxed processes, and then limits the types of queries each component can make to shared storage. While previous approaches like Decentralized Information Flow Control sought to provide security guarantees by explicitly labeling and tracking data, Passe provides similar guarantees by instead enforcing integrity constraints on database queries, even when they originate from compromised components. Further, rather than requiring developers to specify such constraints explicitly, Passe infers these constraints during a testing phase, in which it assumes that the “proper” execution of database queries is reading and writing data appropriately. Such policy inference allows Passe to execute unmodified applications without explicit policies. I present a prototype of Passe which acts as a drop-in replacement for the Django web framework. By running seven unmodified, off-the shelf applications in Passe, I demonstrate its ability to provide strong security guarantees with reasonable performance. Reading List "Principles of Computer System Design" - Saltzer and Kaashoek "The KeyKOS Nanokernel Architecture" A. Bomberger, A. Frantz, W. Frantz, A. Hardy, N. Hardy, C. Landau, and J. Shapiro. "Complete, Safe Information Flow with Decentralized Labels" A. Myers and B. Liskov. "Hails: Protecting data privacy in untrusted web applications." Daniel B. Giffin, Amit Levy, Deian Stefan, David Terei, David Mazières, John Mitchell, and Alejandro Russo. “The protection of information in computer systems,” J. H. Saltzer and M. D. Schroeder, "Information Flow Control for Standard OS Abstractions" (Flume) Max Krohn, Alexander Yip, Micah Brodsky, Natan Cliffer, M. Frans Kaashoek, Eddie Kohler, Robert Morris "Making information flow explicit in HiStar. " Nickolai Zeldovich, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Eddie Kohler, and David Mazières. “Bugs as deviant behavior: a general approach to inferring errors in systems code" D. Engler, D. Y. Chen, S. Hallem, A. Chou, and B. Chelf “All you ever wanted to know about dynamic taint analysis and forward symbolic execution (but might have been afraid to ask),” E. J. Schwartz, T. Avgerinos, and D. Brumley “Building secure high-performance web services with OKWS" - Max Krohn