SaTC: CORE: Small: Information Flow Control Infrastructure for Single-Use Service Platforms

许多应用程序现在都部署在丰富的分布式平台上，例如云计算和物联网（IoT）。这样的平台可以帮助开发人员动态地启动他们的应用程序，使资源使用与无服务器平台中的需求保持一致，并通过将细粒度组件组合成微服务架构中的完整应用程序。即使有了这些先进的体系结构，系统平台本身仍然有大量的可信计算基础，其中单个漏洞可能威胁到整个平台的安全性。这是因为平台服务对所有应用程序都可用，并且通常受到其他平台服务的完全信任。因此，恶意应用程序可能危及易受攻击的服务，从而获得对另一个应用程序数据的访问和/或危及另一个应用程序计算的完整性。该项目将产生理论和技术来部署平台服务，以保护使用信息流控制的应用程序。首先，提倡将无状态平台服务部署为单用途服务：按需启动的服务，以代表单个命令执行操作，非常类似于无服务器应用程序。其次，通过对单用途服务实施信息流控制来保护应用程序数据，验证实施服务静态地执行信息流控制。第三，该项目试图通过开发将服务划分为强制服务和单一用途服务的方法来减少对复杂、单一服务的信任，这些服务可以使用信息流控制进行验证或治理。与当前强制访问控制以保护主机免受不可信应用程序攻击的平台相比，将开发基础设施来构建使用信息流控制保护应用程序免受潜在易受攻击服务攻击的平台。作为更广泛影响的一部分，本研究探讨了如何在新兴分布式平台中“构建安全”的方法。各种各样的商业努力都瞄准了基于容器的云和物联网平台，但是缺乏基础设施来帮助程序员构建既符合安全要求又能实现所需功能的平台。开发的开源工具和示例平台将用于课程作业，并积极向行业从业者推销，以获得反馈并增加采用率。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Many applications are now being deployed on rich, distributed platforms, such as those for cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT). Such platforms can aid developers by launching their applications dynamically to align resource use with demand in serverless platforms and by composing fine-grained components into complete applications in microservice architectures. Even with these advanced architectures, the system platforms themselves still have large trusted computing bases, where a single vulnerability may threaten the security of the entire platform. This occurs because platform services are available to all applications and are typically fully trusted by other platform services. As a result, a malicious application may compromise a vulnerable service to gain access to another application's data and/or compromise the integrity of another application's computing.The project will produce theories and techniques to deploy platform services to protect applications using information flow control. First, it is advocated that stateless platform services be deployed as single-use services: services launched on demand to perform an operation on behalf of a single command, much like serverless applications. Second, application data is protected by enforcing information flow control over single-use services, validating that enforcement services perform information flow control statically. Third, the project seeks to reduce trust in complex, monolithic services by developing methods to partition services into enforcement services and single-use services, which can be either validated or governed using information flow control. In contrast to current platforms that enforce mandatory access control to protect hosts from untrusted applications, an infrastructure will be developed to build platforms that protect applications from potentially vulnerable services using information flow control. As part of broader impacts, this research examines methods for how to "build security in" to emerging distributed platforms. A wide variety of commercial efforts are targeting container-based cloud and IoT platforms, but there is a dearth of infrastructure to aid programmers in constructing platforms that adhere to security requirements while achieving desired functionality. The open-source tools and example platforms developed will be utilized in coursework and aggressively pitched to industry practitioners to gain feedback and increase adoption.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.