Noise: A Library of Verified High-Performance Secure Channel Protocol Implementations

Memory-safety violations are the primary cause of security and reliability issues in software systems written in unsafe languages. Given the limited adoption of decades-long research in software-based memory safety approaches, as an alternative, Intel released Memory Protection Extensions (MPX)---a hardware-assisted technique to achieve memory safety. In this work, we perform an exhaustive study of Intel MPX architecture along three dimensions: (a) performance overheads, (b) security guarantees, and (c) usability issues. We present the first detailed root cause analysis of problems in the Intel MPX architecture through a cross-layer dissection of the entire system stack, involving the hardware, operating system, compilers, and applications. To put our findings into perspective, we also present an in-depth comparison of Intel MPX with three prominent types of software-based memory safety approaches. Lastly, based on our investigation, we propose directions for potential changes to the Intel MPX architecture to aid the design space exploration of future hardware extensions for memory safety.

Cryptographic protocols are often expected to be provably secure. However, this security guarantee often falls short in practice due to various implementation flaws. We propose a new paradigm called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">cryptographic program analysis (CPA)</i> which prescribes the use of program analysis to detect these implementation flaws at compile time. The principal insight of the CPA is that many of these flaws in cryptographic implementations can be mapped to the violation of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">meta-level properties</i> of implementations. A program property that is necessary to realize a cryptographic property is referred to as meta-level property. We show that violations of these meta-level properties can be identified at compile-time that can serve as sufficient evidence of the encompassing flaws. We investigated existing literature on cryptographic implementation flaws and derived 25 corresponding meta-level properties. To instantiate the abstract paradigm of CPA, we develop a specification language based on deterministic finite automaton (DFA) and show that most of the meta-level properties can be expressed in terms of our language. We then develop a tool called <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TaintCrypt</small> which uses static taint analysis to identify meta-level property violations of C/C++ cryptographic implementations at compile-time. We demonstrate the efficacy of <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TaintCrypt</small> by analyzing open-source C/C++ cryptographic libraries (e.g., OpenSSL) and observe that <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TaintCrypt</small> could have helped to avoid several high-profile flaws. We also evaluated <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TaintCrypt</small> on 5 popular applications and libraries, which generated new security insights. The experimental evaluation on large-scale projects indicates the scalability of our approach.

Software security defenses are routinely broken by the persistence of both security researchers and attackers. Hardware solutions based on tagging are emerging as a promising technique that provides strong security guarantees (e.g., memory safety) while incurring minimal runtime overheads and maintaining compatibility with existing codebases. Such schemes extend every word in memory with a tag and enforce security policies across them. This paper provides a survey of existing work on tagged architectures and describe the types of attacks such architectures aim to prevent as well as the guarantees they provide. It highlights the main distinguishing factors among tagged architectures and presents the diversity of designs and implementations that have been proposed. The survey reveals several real-world challenges have been neglected relating to both security and practical deployment. The challenges relate to the provisioning and enforcement phases of tagged architectures, and various overheads they incur. This work identifies these challenges as open research problems and provides suggestions for improving their security and practicality.

This paper describes the design and the prototyping of a compiling tool for the automated implementation of distributed applications: ALFred. This compiler starts from the formal specification of an application written in ESTEREL and then integrates end-to-end communication functions tailored to the application characteristics (described in the specification); it finally produces a high performance implementation. The paper describes the communication architecture associated with the approach. The compiler consists of a control compiler, also called ALF compiler, and a data manipulation compiler (the ILP compiler) that combines data manipulation functions in an efficient way (the ILP loop). The ALFred compiler has been designed to allow the development and the analysis of non-layered high performance communication architectures based on ALF and ILP.

The “making women productive” strategy is back. The framing of women’s role in development in terms of efficiency and effectiveness – a framing that has its roots in the 1980s – has once again come to dominate the agenda, both within the international community and in the Mexican context. The manifestation of the “making women productive” strategy in the Mexican context has to be understood against the backdrop of processes of global and regional neoliberal restructuring, which have led to a fundamental reorganization of the Mexican political economy. The modernization and restructuring of the Mexican economy meant a complete transformation of agricultural and industrial production oriented towards export. The restructuring of the Mexican state was influenced by two generations of SAPs that transformed the social sector, with wide-ranging implications for welfare and poverty reduction policies. The consequences of this restructuring are multi-fold: agricultural crisis; growing pressure on labor to become more mobile and flexible, resulting in migration; decreasing social welfare provisions by the state; and growing inequality and poverty. The rural population has been hit particularly hard, and the rural crisis extended to the cities through growing rural – urban migration, but also resulted in an increase in mainly male and undocumented international migration. Thus, Mexican communities have experienced profound demographic, socio-economic, and cultural transformations that are deeply gendered. Situated within this context, the“making women productive” strategy takes on specific forms, emphasizing the duty of women to get involved in income-generating work as a counterpart to the remittances sent by their migrant spouses. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the sightings, sites, and resistances ofthe “making women productive” strategy as a dimension of global restructuring, focusing on the Mexican context. This involves analyzing the assumptions of the “making women productive” discourse, examining the different forms and localities in which it manifests itself, and tracing the various forms of resistance and empowerment that it generates. I argue that, in the context of global restructuring, there has been a resurgence of the discourse of “making women productive,” which in the Mexican context involves a complex combination of disciplining, resistance, and empowerment. This chapter draws on in-depth interviews and participant observationundertaken during recurrent periods of fieldwork research in two rural Mexican communities between 2005 and 2008: Los Pilares, a mestizo2 community in the state of Tlaxcala, and San Lorenzo, an Indigenous community of the Purepecha region in the state of Michoacan.3 These two rural Mexican communities are of similar size, and characterized by a relatively high rate of poverty, a high degree of illiteracy, and a general lack of basic infrastructure and services. Both communities have a high rate of mainly male and undocumented emigration to the US, as is generally still the case for rural Mexico (World Bank n.d.). The international migration of Mexican women (either independently or to join their spouses) has increased considerably over the last decade, but generally represents only a small, albeit growing, percentage of emigrants from rural communities. This means that a significant number of households live on remittances,4 either as a complementary or single source of income. Within both communities, there are efforts under way to link migration to development, that is, to harness migration and remittances for some project which would contribute to the development of the community (see Kunz 2008 and forthcoming). While San Lorenzo is situated in Michoacan, a state with a long tradition of migration and a considerable number of migrants in the US, Los Pilares is located in Tlaxcala, a state that has only recently joined international migration flows, but has a long internal migration tradition. The chapter proceeds as follows: the next section outlines the analyticalframework; section three traces the manifestations of global restructuring in Mexico; section four explores the sighting of “making women productive” in the Mexican context and its embeddedness in the global context; and section five examines its implications for rural Mexican communities, identifying sites and resistances.

Over the last decade we have strived through a collaborative writing project to open a polyvocal and layered conversation on critical contemporary issues in teacher education, even as our program faced its demise. Our writing inquiries began as a critical thinking-through of the qualities of lived experiences as instructors within an innovative and now defunct teacher education program. The context for our work was a radically construed approach to teacher education that—in its language, form, and curriculum—challenged prevailing norms of practice. In our collaborative writing we confront the difficult work of teacher education, addressing specific challenges, complex demands, and forms of resistance that are prevalent in faculties of education everywhere. Such challenges include how we narrate alternative visions of teacher education, attend to issues of ethics and recognition, deal with the complexities of learning professional practice and take into account the larger, historical project of teacher education. As a provocative example of self-study research, our collaborative method of inquiry illustrates the richness and productivity of poetic, practice-based research, oriented to critical issues in teacher education. The intentional effort to make our work public and politically provocative is an attempt by the authors to reveal the importance of these critical conversations in advancing our work. Specifically, what makes such conversations important includes questions about how we should enact our responsibilities for teacher education and also how we give account for enacting those responsibilities. We intend our conversations and thinking-through about practices in teacher education to remain open-ended and responsive to a plurality of thought and experience. Collaborative writing serves for us as a kind of resistance, reclaiming, re-storying, and historical accounting through encounters with others.

Information systems (IS) outsourcing projects often fail to achieve initial goals. To avoid project failure, managers need to design formal controls that meet the specific contextual demands of the project. However, the dynamic and uncertain nature of IS outsourcing projects makes it difficult to design such specific formal controls at the outset of a project. It is hence crucial to translate high-level project goals into specific formal controls during the course of a project. This study seeks to understand the underlying patterns of such translation processes. Based on a comparative case study of four outsourced software development projects, we inductively develop a process model that consists of three unique patterns. The process model shows that the performance implications of emergent controls with higher specificity depend on differences in the translation process. Specific formal controls have positive implications for goal achievement if only the stakeholder context is adapted, while they are negative for goal achievement if in the translation process tasks are unintendedly adapted. In the latter case projects incrementally drift away from their initial direction. Our findings help to better understand control dynamics in IS outsourcing projects. We contribute to a process theoretic understanding of IS outsourcing governance and we derive implications for control theory and the IS project escalation literature.

Цитирование: Рыжова Н.П., Журавская Т.Н. (2019) Жилищный вопрос в советской и постсоветской России: трансформация отношений собственности и повседневная политика // Мир России. Т. 28. № 3. С. 48–66. DOI: 10.17323/1811-038X-2019-28-3-48-66&#x0D; В статье сделана попытка применения концепций повседневной политики и рутинного сопротивления для объяснения процессов трансформации политической организации и отношений собственности на примере жилищных практик в советской и постсоветской России. Анализируется, как проводились реформы отношений собственности в советское время и как они сказывались на повседневной жизни людей. Показано, что советская политическая организация формировала идеологию, пытаясь изменить рациональность и практики повседневной жизни. В соответствии с марксистской идеологией, ментальный контроль привел к контролю над материальностью, в результате чего члены правящей партии доминировали над людьми, не обладающими формальными правами собственности. При этом производство «нового советского гражданина» осуществлялось посредством множества бессвязных, диффузных и повсеместных действий представителей партии, административных единиц и «обычных» людей. Рутинное сопротивление препятствовало полному исчезновению отношений частной собственности, поскольку, несмотря на почти полное отсутствие в формальном поле ее разрешенной формы в советское время, частная собственность все же существовала, хотя имела определенную культурную специфику (в частности, практики псевдорыночной продажи, обмена, наследования жилья). Формы рутинного сопротивления советского периода стали одним из факторов, способствовавших политической реорганизации начала 1990-х. Последующие осложнения в реализации рыночных преобразований, в свою очередь, во многом определялись сопротивлением материальной инфраструктуры, произведенной в советское время, которая продолжает влиять на формы рутинного сопротивления в настоящее время. В результате жилье как материальный объект стало одной из важных причин неудачной рыночной трансформации в России. Авторы опираются на представленные в академической литературе описания советских жилищных практик и на данные многолетних включенных наблюдений в Санкт-Петербурге, Благовещенске и в одной из деревень Амурской области.

VeriFast is a sound modular formal verification tool for C and Java programs. Based on separation logic and using symbolic execution, VeriFast can verify not only memory safety of programs but also full functional correctness. Formal verification is a powerful way of analyzing code, but not yet widely used in practice. Source code has to be annotated with formal specification mostly in the form of function preconditions and postconditions. In this paper, we present Automated VeriFast which is a new extension or an automation layer that lies on top of VeriFast that, given a partially annotated program, offers to attempt to incrementally improve the annotations, e.g. by inferring a fix to the specification of a program fragment that fails to verify. Our thesis is that such small, interactive inference steps will have practical benefits over non-interactive specification inference approaches by allowing the user to guide the inference process and by being simpler and therefore more predictable and diagnosable.

The system of slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal and racist social order, legitimatized and facilitated not only the economic and racist oppression but the sexual exploitation of black slave women. An extensive review of the literature on slavery was used to address how slave women accommodated and resisted these multiple forms of oppression. The findings presented here indicate that as blacks, both sexes experienced the harsh and inhumane consequences of racism and economic exploitation. In response to their exploitation, there was a significant convergence in male and female involvement in such forms of "criminal" resistance, such as murder, assault, theft and arson. These actions were employed to improve the slaves' lot in life and to express opposition to the slave system. "Criminal" resistance therefore set the stage for black women's participation in the criminal activities characteristic of today. Findings also suggest that in response to sexual exploitation, gender specific forms of accommodation-eg., acting as breeders and sex workers-were utilized in order to make slave women's lives bearable. The article concludes that the various forms of accommodation served as a preface to black women's vulnerability to sex-oriented crimes within the context of the twentieth century American society.

A class-based scheme for E-commerce web servers: Formal specification and performance evaluation

This paper describes a lab project in computer communications and networks for senior undergraduate students in computer science and engineering. Given detailed specifications, students are asked to implement a data link layer (DLL) that integrates correctly with other provided layers to obtain a complete working network stack. This lab gives the students the opportunity to learn how to read formal specifications for a network project and write a complete piece of source code. It provides a comprehensive environment for students to write software for a network protocol, test and debug it, and observe its working behavior. In this paper, the authors present a technical description of the project and a discussion of related educational issues.

A survey of charophycean green algal and bryophyte taxa revealed the frequent occurrence of vegetative cell walls that were characterized by a specific form of autofluorescence and resistance to high temperature acid treatment (acetolysis). The time of production and the location of resistant, autofluorescent cell walls varied among charophyte and bryophyte taxa in patterns that suggest that bryophytes inherited the capacity to produce such walls from charophyte ancestors. A number of charophytes produced resistant walls in response to desiccation stress, suggesting an evolutionarily early adaptive response. Coleochaete was unique among charophytes, but similar to all bryophytes tested in that sexual reproduction induced autofluorescence in cell walls of well-hydrated tissues at the placental junction. Maternal tissues in apical portions of the pseudoseta bearing Sphagnum sporophytes were characterized by autofluorescent, acetolysis-resistant cell walls similar to those observed in maternal cells adjacent to Coleochaete zygotes. These observations suggest that cell–cell stimulus–response interactions regulate deposition of autofluorescent compounds in placental cell walls, and that this characteristic may have been shared by the earliest embryophytes and their charophyte ancestors. Various bryophytes deposit autofluorescent, acid-resistant compounds at other adaptively significant sites including sporangial epidermis, spiral thickenings of elaters, rhizoids, and leaves in the special case of Sphagnum moss. Sphagnum and liverwort sporangial epidermis, which had been subjected to acetolysis or strong acid procedures commonly used to release microfossils from rock matrices, resembled published photographs of Ordovician–Devonian microfossils consisting of cellular scraps that have been attributed to earliest land plants. Our work suggests that at least some of these fossils, previously thought to represent “dispersed cuticles,” could be reinterpreted as earliest known remains of plant sporophytic tissues, and that they may be homologous with resistant sporangial epidermis of modern bryophytes. In general, the patterns of occurrence of resistant, autofluorescent cell walls in charophytes and bryophytes suggest repeated exaptation. Regulation of deposition appears to have been modified through time, so that resistant wall compounds have had a sequence of functions: desiccation resistance and/or microbial resistance in lower charophytes, a role in embryogenesis in Coleochaete and embryophytes, and finally, decay resistance in innovative structures that characterize bryophytes, such as rhizoids, sporangial epidermis, and elaters.

Regulation of redox status contributes to priming defense against Botrytis cinerea in grape berries treated with β-aminobutyric acid

Cryptographic Primitives that Resist Backdooring and Subversion