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Département d'ingénierie informatique |
Researcher : Y. Jaradin, B. Mejias, F. Spiessens
Description :
Computer security is a major preoccupation today both in the computer science community and in general society. While there are many short-term solutions to security problems, a good long-term solution requires rethinking our programming languages and operating systems. One crucial idea is that languages and operating systems should thoroughly support the principle of least authority (POLA). This support starts from the user interface and goes all the way down to basic object invocations. With such thorough support, many security problems that are considered difficult today become much simpler. For example, the so-called trade-off between security and usability largely goes away. We can have security without compromising usability.
The goal of the Oz-E project is to realize the vision of simplifying computer security by thoroughly exploiting POLA. We will build a multiparadigm programming language based on POLA, using the experience gained from the Oz and E languages. Concurrently, we will explore building secure systems with such a language and see how far a properly designed language can take us in building secure computer systems.