BAE Systems: Redesigning the Computer for Security

  • Tom Hawkins
September 22, 2013 10:50 - 11:15 AM

Abstract

With increasing computer security threats facing the Department of Defense and the nation's critical infrastructure, DARPA is funding a clean-slate research initiative to redesign the computer for defense-in-depth security, covering applications and operating systems down to physical hardware. The SAFE team -- a partnership between BAE Systems, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and Northeastern University -- is meeting this challenge by designing new programming languages, a new operating system, and a new processor; with fine-grained information flow control (IFC) enforced at every level in the stack. Functional programming has played a pivotal roll throughout the project. For example, the SAFE tool suite -- a collection of compilers, interpreters, simulators, and EDSLs -- is built almost entirely in Haskell. The processor is designed in Bluespec: a functional hardware description language. Formal verification of the platform is done in Coq and gets a big boost from random testing in QuickCheck. Finally, we have developed Breeze, a new functional language (inspired by ML, Haskell, and Racket) for writing secure, high-level applications for SAFE. In this presentation we will provide a brief overview of the SAFE architecture, touching everything from the Breeze language and IFC security labels down to processing security tags in hardware. We will take a closer look at the SAFE assembly DSL and the Tempest system programming DSL -- both embedded in Haskell -- which we are using to bootstrap our operating system and compiler development efforts. http://www.crash-safe.org/

Tom Hawkins

was educated in electrical engineering and control systems in the US, and later acquired skills in functional programming, most likely in training camps and Barnes and Noble bookstores in the tribal regions of Minneapolis (Edina suburb) in early 2000. As an active mole, he is known for infiltrating large industrial organizations and subverting their development practices with functional programming and formal methods. In addition to spreading propaganda on FPist websites (Hackage), he is suspected of numerous actions including supplying and training rebels with Haskell for hybrid powertrain control software at Eaton Corporation, introducing model checking at Medtronic resulting in the safety escalation of implantable medical devices, and at one point he devised a functional HDL called Confluence in an attempt to disrupt the world's Verilog development. We think Tom was radicalized at a young age when, at his first career at Honeywell, he was forced to spend 40 hours a week (with pay and benefits) drawing lines and boxes in Simulink diagrams for flight control avionics. Though his current whereabouts are unknown, he is believed to be operating under alias somewhere within BAE Systems.