CMU

Compositional security is a recognized central scientific challenge for trustworthy computing. Contemporary systems are built up from smaller components. However, even if each component is secure in isolation, the composed system may not achieve the desired end-to-end security property: an adversary may exploit complex interactions between components to compromise security. Such attacks have shown up in the wild in many different settings, including web browsers and infrastructure, network protocols and infrastructure, and application and systems software.

Mobile applications are a critical emerging segment of the software industry, and security for web-based mobile applications is of increasing concern. We hypothesize that many of the most important security vulnerabilities in web-based mobile applications are a consequence of expressing programs at a low level of abstraction, in which important security properties are implicit and only indirectly related to code. In order to test this hypothesis, we are building a system for expressing web-based mobile applications at a higher level of abstraction, in which security properties a