TC: Medium: Collaborative Research: Securing Concurrency in Modern Systems

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Concurrency-related vulnerabilities are pervasive in modern computing systems. Concurrency exploits include time-of-check-to-time-of-use (TOCTTOU) race conditions in file systems, attacks on signal handlers, and evasive malware that uses concurrency to escape sandboxing mechanisms. As processors feature ever more parallelism, and computers process more of our sensitive data, defending against concurrency attacks is a key challenge for the coming decade. The first goal is to protect legitimate applications from concurrency attacks when they access system resources (e.g., prevent TOCTTOU attacks on file accesses and exploitable race conditions in signal handlers). The objective is to provide application programmers with mechanisms and policies for synchronizing access to system resources so they can avoid unintentional vulnerabilities. The second goal is to provide strong confinement of untrusted code in the presence of concurrency, i.e., blocking intentionally malicious behavior. Today's malware abuses concurrency mechanisms to bypass and circumvent containment mechanisms like reference monitors and system call wrappers. Providing robust system support for containing malicious code is a critical challenge in intrusion detection and prevention. Modern computing systems fundamentally depend on concurrency for their performance and functionality. Making sure that concurrency is used securely is essential for building a trusted cyber infrastructure. This research will have a significant impact on the practical development of secure software, and enable security-critical applications to realize the performance benefits of today's highly parallel systems.