Biblio

The principle of least privilege requires that components of a program have access to only those resources necessary for their proper function. Defining proper function is a difficult task. Existing methods of privilege separation, like Control Flow Integrity and Software Fault Isolation, attempt to infer proper function by bridging the gaps between language abstractions and hardware capabilities. However, it is programmer intent that defines proper function, as the programmer writes the code that becomes law. Codifying programmer intent into policy is a promising way to capture proper function; however, often onerous policy creation can unnecessarily delay development and adoption. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of our ELF-based access control (ELFbac), a novel technique for policy definition and enforcement. ELFbac leverages the common programmer's existing mental model of scope, and allows for policy definition at the Application Binary Interface (ABI) level. We consider the roaming vulnerability found in OpenSSH, and demonstrate how using ELFbac would have provided strong mitigation with minimal program modification. This serves to illustrate the effectiveness of ELFbac as a means of privilege separation in further applications, and the intuitive, yet robust nature of our general approach to policy creation.

Mission assurance requires effective, near-real time defensive cyber operations to appropriately respond to cyber attacks, without having a significant impact on operations. The ability to rapidly compute, prioritize and execute network-based courses of action (CoAs) relies on accurate situational awareness and mission-context information. Although diverse solutions exist for automatically collecting and analysing infrastructure data, few deliver automated analysis and implementation of network-based CoAs in the context of the ongoing mission. In addition, such processes can be operatorintensive and available tools tend to be specific to a set of common data sources and network responses. To address these issues, Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) is leading the development of the Automated Computer Network Defence (ARMOUR) technology demonstrator and cyber defence science and technology (S&T) platform. ARMOUR integrates new and existing off-the-shelf capabilities to provide enhanced decision support and to automate many of the tasks currently executed manually by network operators. This paper describes the cyber defence integration framework, situational awareness, and automated mission-oriented decision support that ARMOUR provides.