KTN ran a collaborators' workshop on 26 September 2019 in London to explain more about the Digital Security by Design Challenge announced by the government. The Digital Security by Design challenge has been recently announced by the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). This challenge, amounting to £70 million of government funding over 5 years, was delivered by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF). This Collaborators' Workshop provides an opportunity to hear more details of the challenge and forthcoming competitions. A Scoping Workshop for this challenge was held on 30th May: http://ow.ly/oz6230pHlGl Find out more about the Defence and Security Interest Group at https://ktn-uk.co.uk/interests/defence-security Join the Defence and Security Interest Group at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8584397 or Follow KTN_UK Defence group on Twitter https://twitter.com/KTNUK_Defence

1. Memory safety in software
Traditional approaches have been
slow
prone to false positives
. . . or failing to support (e.g.) common-ish C idioms
Since 2011 my libcrunch project has investigated a new approach
based on run-time type information
. . . and run-time model of allocation structure
Reasonably usable tool (by research standards)
$ cc ‘crunchcc-cflags‘ -o myprog ...
$ ./myprog # run normally; or
$ LD_PRELOAD=libcrunch.so ./myprog # run with checks
myprog: Failed __is_a_internal(0x5a1220, 0x413560
a.k.a. "uint$32") at 0x40dade, allocation was a
heap block of int$32 originating at 0x40daa1
Stephen Kell (S.R.Kell@kent.ac.uk)

2. Opportunities
So far, a tool rather like a more precise AddressSanitizer
but also type-aware, subobject-precise checks
perf-competitive with ASan (faster in some cases)
Some variants also created at modest effort
emulating prior work (for comparison)
pointer provenance checking (for C spec work)
More useful variants: CHERI-style checking?
as compatibility testbed
as experimentation framework
as execution environment on non-CHERI-enabled arch/hw
your idea here!
Ask me! Also https://github.com/stephenrkell/libcrunch/
Stephen Kell (S.R.Kell@kent.ac.uk)