Horia Corclaciuc
CSRG seminar on 14th March 2008 at 12:00
Room 245, School of Computer Science

Enforcing Security in Programming Languages using Separation Logic

Abstract: Contrary to high level languages (for example Java), low
level programming languages offer an increased freedom when dealing with
issues such as memory management but this usually comes at the cost of
security. It is thus necessary to add a secure logic layer to low level
languages in order to reclaim part of that security. In this talk I will
show the recent advances we've made in enforcing security in low level
programming languages using Hoare logic and its extension separation
logic. I will also show examples of the common security flaws and
exploits, their effect, and to what extent these can be fixed by using
simple programming logic. At the end of the talk, I'll try to give
pointers to further research and problems we have yet to tackle.