Recent Advances in System Software Security - Frank Piessens
Channel: secappdev.org
Date: 2017-01-12

The war between attackers and defenders of system software (i.e. servers, middleware, operating systems) has been ongoing for decades.
This session will cover a number of interesting new technologies that have the potential of being game changers in this ares:
Protected module architectures (like the new Intel Software Guard Extensions - Intel SGX) make it possible to securely execute applications on a machine, even when the system software (e.g. the operating system) on that machine is infected and hence malicious.
New safe systems programming languages (like Mozilla's Rust programming language) make it possible to prevent the introduction of memory safety vulnerabilities in systems code (and at the same time also prevent the introduction of data races in multi-threaded code!)
Advances in defensive compilation make it possible to compile legacy C code with hard assurances on resistance against memory safety based attacks.
This session will give an overview of these exciting and promising new technologies.

Frank Piessens is a professor at the Department of Computer Science of the KU Leuven, Belgium. His research interests lie in software security, including security in operating systems and middleware, architectures, applications, Java and .NET, and software interfaces to security technologies.
He is an active participant in both fundamental research and industrial application-driven projects, provides consultancy to industry on distributed system security and serves on programme committees for various security-related international scientific conferences.
Frank teaches software security at the KU Leuven, and at various academic and industrial conferences.