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 computingsystems. 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 sandboxingmechanisms. As processors feature ever more parallelism, andcomputers process more of our sensitive data, defending againstconcurrency attacks is a key challenge for the coming decade.The first goal is to protect legitimate applications from concurrencyattacks when they access system resources (e.g., prevent TOCTTOUattacks on file accesses and exploitable race conditions in signalhandlers). The objective is to provide application programmers withmechanisms and policies for synchronizing access to system resourcesso they can avoid unintentional vulnerabilities.The second goal is to provide strong confinement of untrusted code inthe presence of concurrency, i.e., blocking intentionally maliciousbehavior. Today's malware abuses concurrency mechanisms to bypass andcircumvent containment mechanisms like reference monitors and systemcall wrappers. Providing robust system support for containingmalicious code is a critical challenge in intrusion detection andprevention.Modern computing systems fundamentally depend on concurrency for theirperformance and functionality. Making sure that concurrency is usedsecurely is essential for building a trusted cyber infrastructure.This research will have a significant impact on the practicaldevelopment of secure software, and enable security-criticalapplications to realize the performance benefits of today's highlyparallel systems.