Abstract
Type-safe, high-level languages such as Java ensure that a wide class of failures, including buffer overruns and format string attacks, simply cannot happen. Unfortunately, our computing infrastructure is built with type-unsafe low-level languages such as C, and it is economically impossible to throw away our existing operating systems, databases, routers, etc. and re-code them all in Java.
Fortunately, a number of recent advances in static analysis, language design, compilation, and run-time systems have given us a set of tools for achieving type safety for legacy C code. In this talk, I will survey some of the progress that has been made in the last few years, and focus on the issues that remain if we are to achieve type safety, and more generally, security for our computing infrastructure.
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Moore, D., Paxson, V., Savage, S., Shannon, C., Staniford, S., Weaver, N.: The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm, http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/nweaver/sapphire/
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Morrisett, G. (2003). Achieving Type Safety for Low-Level Code. In: Saraswat, V.A. (eds) Advances in Computing Science – ASIAN 2003. Progamming Languages and Distributed Computation Programming Languages and Distributed Computation. ASIAN 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2896. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40965-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-40965-6_1
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