Teach Yourself Capabilities in 60 Minutes

Abstract:

Do you remember those thick paperback books we used to buy, with titles like "Teach yourself C++ in 24 hours" and "Perl for Dummies"? This talk has a similar flavour, only the topic for our rapid learning is _capabilities_ - these are unforgeable microarchitectural tokens that enable secure CPU access to memory. We will motivate the need for more secure systems software and illustrate how capabilities address the problem. We will explore the Digital Security by Design (DSbD) software ecosystem and review a range of capability-aware memory allocators.

Short Bio:

Jeremy is a senior lecturer in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, where he has worked since 2010. Prior to that, he did a postdoc in Steve Furber's Advanced Processor Technologies group at Manchester. Jeremy completed his PhD in the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in 2005. His research interests include compilers, programming language runtimes, garbage collection, manycore parallelism and cybersecurity.