Hello,

Registration is now open for the fifty-ninth meeting, featuring talks on trust and provenance in Open Data at GDS, adding security to compilers (LADA project and SECURE project), extending a RISC ISA to add capability enhancements for improved security (CHERI project).

A big thanks to Sevan Janiyan and Andy Bennett for arranging this meeting!

Details and registration link below.

Cheers,

Andrew

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OSHUG #59 — CHERI CPU, Adding Security to Compilers, Trust & Provenance in Open Data.

On the 27 July 2017, 18:00 - 21:00 at BCS London, 1st Floor, The Davidson Building, 5 Southampton Street, London, WC2E 7HA.

Registration: http://oshug.org/event/59

After a brief hiatus we return this month for an evening of talks on the topics of trust and provenance in Open Data at GDS, adding security to compilers (LADA project and SECURE project), extending a RISC ISA to add capability enhancements for improved security (CHERI project).

— Trust and provenance in Open Data

T.B.A.

— Adding security to compilers

Information leakage via side channels is a widely recognised threat to cyber security. In particular small devices are known to leak information through physical channels, i.e. power consumption, electromagnetic radiation, and timing behaviour. Serveral implementation techniques and countermeasures are arising nowadays against this kind of threaths, but still only fully equipped testing labs with skilled people can afford to test new implementations against leakage attacks. We will focus on the information leakage due to timing behaviour and the possibility of 'cache-based' timing attacks. Then we will discuss about my work in the context of two projects (LADA project and SECURE project) which aim at bringing the skill of a testing lab to the desk of a developer of standard consumer devices, without the need for domain specific knowledge through the development of open source compilers.

* Paolo Savini is an Intern Compiler Engineer at Embecosm Ltd working on the SECURE Project, where he is helping to bring the next generation of secure programming techniques to open source compilers. Prior to joining Embecosm he cooperated with the LADA project at the University of Bristol in order to explore the possility of creating compiler tools to help improve implementation of cryptography. Paolo is currently graduating at the University of Pavia (Italy), where he achieved a Bachelor degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering.

— The CHERI CPU: Hardware-software co-design for security

This talk will introduce the CHERI CPU and associated C/C++ compiler stack. Various design decisions in the project were made based on the needs of programming languages to support real-world code and the requirements of hardware implementation. The C specification is intentionally vague and it would be very easy to create a conforming implementation of the language if this were the only requirement, but a C environment is only as good as the code that it runs. In the CHERI project, we have investigated a number of common C idioms and ensured that these can be supported by our hardware, while simultaneously allowing fine-grained memory safety and coarser-grained compartmentalisation of C programs.

* David Chisnall is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. His primary research interest is safe interoperability between programming languages. Most recently, he has been working on this in the context of the CHERI project, creating an implementation of the C programming language that can be used safely in the same process as languages with stricter safety guarantees. He presented a case study of this, allowing Java and C code to coexist in the same process without violating any of the JVM's safety and security guarantees at ASPLOS earlier this year. David is an active open source contributor, having been an LLVM committer since 2008, a member of the FreeBSD Core Team for two successive terms, and the author / maintainer of widely deployed Objective-C and C++ runtime libraries.

Note: Please aim to arrive by 18:15 as the event will start at 18:30 prompt.