Hi, Last month, Mark Miller gave a series of talks at the University of Brussels on SES and capability-based security. The videos of the talks have now been made fully available on Youtube. Abstracts follow:
Talk 1/2: Secure Distributed Programming with Object-capabilities in JavaScript Until now, browser-based security has been hell. The object-capability (ocap) model provides a simple and expressive alternative. Google's Caja project uses the latest JavaScript standard, EcmaScript 5, to support fine-grained safe mobile code, solving the secure mashup problem. Dr. SES -- Distributed Resilient Secure EcmaScript -- extends the ocap model cryptographically over the network, enabling RESTful composition of mutually suspicious web services. We show how to apply the expressiveness of object programming to the expression of security patterns, solving security problems normally thought to be difficult with simple elegant programs. Slides: <http://soft.vub.ac.be/events/mobicrant_talks/talk1_ocaps_js.pdf> Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9hHHvhZ_HY> Talk 2/2: Bringing Object-orientation to Security Programming Just as we should not expect our base programming language to provide all the data types we need, so we should not expect our security foundation to provide all the abstractions we need to express security policy. The answer to both is the same: We need foundations that provide simple abstraction mechanisms, which we use to build an open ended set of abstractions, which we then use to express policy. We show how to use EcmaScript 5 to enforce the security latent in object-oriented abstraction mechanisms: encapsulation, message-passing, polymorphism, and interposition. With these secured, we show how to build abstractions for confinement, rights amplification, transitive wrapping and revocation, and smart contracts. Slides: <http://soft.vub.ac.be/events/mobicrant_talks/talk2_OO_security.pdf> Video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBqeDYETXME> Kind regards, Tom Van Cutsem
