Lecture

Programming Language Security

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In course

COM-402: Information security and privacy

This course provides an overview of information security and privacy topics. It introduces students to the knowledge and tools they will need to deal with the security/privacy challenges they are likely to encounter in today's world. The tools are illustra ...

Description

This lecture delves into the topic of programming language security, focusing on aspects such as type safety, memory safety, and threat safety. The instructor discusses the importance of type systems, the challenges of memory safety vulnerabilities, and the role of modern programming languages like Rust in enhancing security. The lecture also covers concepts like ownership, borrowing, and the use of unsafe code in Rust. Furthermore, it explores the principles of sandboxing, compartmentalization, and the promise of least privilege. The session concludes with a practical exercise involving Rust and C code conversion to understand safety guarantees.

Instructors (4)

Jean-Pierre Hubaux

Jean-Pierre Hubaux is a full professor at EPFL and head of the Laboratory for Data Security. Through his research, he contributes to laying the foundations and developing the tools for protecting privacy in today’s hyper-connected world. He has pioneered the areas of privacy and security in mobile/wireless networks and in personalized health. He is the academic director of the Center for Digital Trust (C4DT). He leads the Data Protection in Personalized Health (DPPH) project funded by the ETH Council and is a co-chair of the Data Security Work Stream of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH). From 2008 to 2019 he was one of the seven commissioners of the Swiss FCC. He is a Fellow of both IEEE (2008) and ACM (2010). Recent awards: two of his papers obtained distinctions at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in 2015 and 2018. He is among the most cited researchers in privacy protection and in information security. Spoken languages: French, English, German, Italian

James Richard Larus

Expertise James Larus is a Professor Emeritus and former Dean of the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) at EPFL (école Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne). Before joining IC in October 2013, Larus was a researcher, manager, and director in Microsoft Research for over 16 years and an Assistant and Associate Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.Larus has been an active contributor to numerous communities. He published over 100 papers (with 14 be

Mathias Josef Payer

Mathias Payer is a security researcher and professor at the EPFL school of computer and communication sciences (IC), leading the HexHive group. His research focuses on protecting applications in the presence of vulnerabilities, with a focus on memory corruption and type violations. He is interested in software security, system security, binary exploitation, effective mitigations, fault isolation/privilege separation, strong sanitization, and software testing (fuzzing) using a combination of binary analysis and compiler-based techniques. More details are available in his CV.

Marcel Busch

Official source

Ontological neighbourhood

Theoretical computer science

Programming language theory: High-level programming languages

Related concepts (32)

Type system

In computer programming, a type system is a logical system comprising a set of rules that assigns a property called a type (for example, integer, floating point, string) to every "term" (a word, phrase, or other set of symbols). Usually the terms are various constructs of a computer program, such as variables, expressions, functions, or modules. A type system dictates the operations that can be performed on a term. For variables, the type system determines the allowed values of that term.

Comparison of programming languages

Programming languages are used for controlling the behavior of a machine (often a computer). Like natural languages, programming languages follow rules for syntax and semantics. There are thousands of programming languages and new ones are created every year. Few languages ever become sufficiently popular that they are used by more than a few people, but professional programmers may use dozens of languages in a career. Most programming languages are not standardized by an international (or national) standard, even widely used ones, such as Perl or Standard ML (despite the name).

Esoteric programming language

An esoteric programming language (sometimes shortened to esolang) is a programming language designed to test the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, as software art, as a hacking interface to another language (particularly functional programming or procedural programming languages), or as a joke. The use of the word esoteric distinguishes them from languages that working developers use to write software.

Programming language theory

Programming language theory (PLT) is a branch of computer science that deals with the design, implementation, analysis, characterization, and classification of formal languages known as programming languages. Programming language theory is closely related to other fields including mathematics, software engineering, and linguistics. There are a number of academic conferences and journals in the area. History of programming languages and Programming language#History In some ways, the history of programming language theory predates even the development of programming languages themselves.

Low-level programming language

A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture—commands or functions in the language map that are structurally similar to processor's instructions. Generally, this refers to either machine code or assembly language. Because of the low (hence the word) abstraction between the language and machine language, low-level languages are sometimes described as being "close to the hardware".

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