Department of Computer Science and Technology

SOAAP

Security-Oriented Analysis of Application Programs (SOAAP)


October 2015: Khilan Gudka has presented our paper on SOAAP, a tool to explore and evaluate compartmentalised software at ACM CCS 2015.

Sandboxing technologies such as Capsicum and CHERI support the fine-grained compartmentalisation of large-scale applications such as web browsers and office suites, as well as multiple-component software such as the UNIX userspace. When deployed correctly, application compartmentalisation offers significant benefits by allowing policies to be imposed within applications, and in mitigating exploited vulnerabilities. However, application compartmentalisation remains an art rather than a science: identifying, implementing, and debugging partitioning strategies requires detailed expertise in both the application and security. SOAAP is exploring semi-automated techniques, grounded in static analysis, dynamic analysis, and automated program transformation, to improve the developer experience. This project is jointly funded by Google and DARPA, and takes place within the context of the CTSRD project.

Conference and journal papers

  • Khilan Gudka, Robert N.M. Watson, Jonathan Anderson, David Chisnall, Brooks Davis, Ben Laurie, Ilias Marinos, Peter G. Neumann, and Alex Richardson. Clean Application Compartmentalization with SOAAP, Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2015), Denver, CO, USA, October 2015.
  • William R. Harris (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Somesh Jha (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Thomas Reps (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Jonathan Anderson (University of Cambridge), and Robert N. M. Watson (University of Cambridge). Declarative, Temporal, and Practical Programming with Capabilities. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy ("Oakland"), May, 2013.

Workshop papers

  • Robert N. M. Watson, Steven J. Murdoch, Khilan Gudka, Jonathan Anderson, Peter G. Neumann, and Ben Laurie. Towards a theory of application compartmentalisation. Security Protocols Workshop, March, 2013.
  • Khilan Gudka, Robert N. M. Watson, Steven Hand, Ben Laurie, and Anil Madhavapeddy. Exploring compartmentalisation hypotheses with SOAAP. Workshop paper, Adaptive Host and Network Security (AHANS 2012), September, 2012.

Presentations