Extrapol update

A quick work regarding the current status of Extrapol and its release.

Development of Extrapol progresses. With our current set of sample, Extrapol works flawlessly. We’re now adding features, improving error reporting and de-hard-wiring the model of the C standard library from the tool and moving it towards an external configuration file as well as progressively moving towards larger and more realistic samples. Development will come to an abrupt (and temporary) halt at the end of this week, though, due to personal matters (i.e. I’m getting married).

The release planned for next week, on the other hand, is canceled. As the research field of applied security is very competitive, and after careful discussion with the rest of my research team, we have decided to only release a version of Extrapol after the scientific content has been accepted for publication in a conference or journal. At the request of one of the institutes which founds this research, I will also refrain from posting detailed information on the theory and algorithms behind Extrapol, until these are cleared by the institute and accepted for publication. Without entering the details, Extrapol is expected to serve in critical infrastructures, which explains the need for clearance.

However, rest assured that there will be a release and it will be open-source (presumably licenced under a combination of MIT and LGPL). The only question is when — and this probably won’t happen before November.

Security Extensions for Firefox, the final word (for this year) is :(

As I mentioned a few months ago, two master students of mine have been working for the best part of one year on improving the security of extensions in Firefox and Thunderbird. To sum up the current situation in Firefox, extensions have no protection mechanism from each other, nor is the core of Firefox protected in any way from extensions. The objective of this work was to design and implement a mechanism allowing system administrators to define fine-grained policies for accepting or rejecting interactions between extensions or between extensions and the core of Firefox.

Security analysis

A few weeks ago, I promised I would tell you more about ExtraPol, my current research project. Well, before doing so, here’s a short reminder about the notion of security in computer science — and the manners of enforcing that security.

While most members of the computer science community agree that safety and security are desirable properties, there is little consensus on the methods to be used for ensuring safety or security. Indeed, even the actual meaning of these properties often remains an open question.

One possibility is to define security in terms of authorizations and safety in terms of real-world hazard. In this context, a system or subsystem is therefore secure if there is no way for something forbidden to happen, while it is safe if its use may only cause acceptable risks. Both notions are very broad and their enforcement is far from trivial. Even the reduced problem of ensuring that the installation and execution of a software application will not breach simple cases of security of a desktop station is an open research issue.

In practice, techniques used or investigated in the domain of security tend to fall roughly into three groups:

• static analysis — try and detect security holes before running the program
• dynamic analysis — try and detect security breaches as they happen
• trace analysis — try and detect security breaches after they have happened.