Section: Overall Objectives

Programming securely with cryptography

In recent years, an increasing amount of sensitive data is being generated, manipulated, and accessed online, from bank accounts to health records. Both national security and individual privacy have come to rely on the security of web-based software applications. But even a single design flaw or implementation bug in an application may be exploited by a malicious criminal to steal, modify, or forge the private records of innocent users. Such attacks are becoming increasingly common and now affect millions of users every year.

The risks of deploying insecure software are too great to tolerate anything less than mathematical proof, but applications have become too large for security experts to examine by hand, and automated verification tools do not scale. Today, there is not a single widely-used web application for which we can give a proof of security, even against a small class of attacks. In fact, design and implementation flaws are still found in widely-distributed and thoroughly-vetted security libraries designed and implemented by experts.

Software security is in crisis. A focused research effort is needed if security programming and analysis techniques are to keep up with the rapid development and deployment of security-critical distributed applications based on new cryptographic protocols and secure hardware devices. The goal of our team Prosecco is to draw upon our expertise in cryptographic protocols and program verification to make decisive contributions in this direction.

Our vision is that, over its lifetime, Prosecco will contribute to making the use of formal techniques when programming with cryptography as natural as the use of software debugger. To this end, our long-term goals are to design and implement programming language abstractions, cryptographic models, verification tools, and verified security libraries that developers can use to deploy provably secure distributed applications. Our target applications include cryptographic protocol implementations, hardware-based security APIs, smartphone- and browser-based web applications, and cloud-based web services. In particular, we aim to verify the full application: both the cryptographic core and the high-level application code. We aim to verify implementations, not just models. We aim to account for computational cryptography, not just its symbolic abstraction.

We identify three key focus areas for our research in the short- to medium term.