New Programming Language Weaves Security Into Code

Ponca City writes "Until now, computer security has been reactive. 'Our defenses improve only after they have been successfully penetrated,' says security expert Fred Schneider. But now Dr. Dobb's reports that researchers at Cornell are developing a programming platform called 'Fabric,' an extension to the Java language that builds security into a program as it is written. Fabric is designed to create secure systems for distributed computing, where many interconnected nodes — not all of them necessarily trustworthy — are involved, as in systems that move money around or maintain medical records. Everything in Fabric is an 'object' labeled with a set of policies on how and by whom data can be accessed and what operations can be performed on it. Even blocks of program code have built-in policies about when and where they can be run. The compiler enforces the security policies and will not allow the programmer to write insecure code (PDF). The initial release of Fabric is now available at the Cornell website."

Comments

Why isn't this code working?

[ak_hepcat]

I -swear- i gave it the right permissions... well, i'll just turn on ALLOW:ANY and debug it..
Hey, that works.. well, it probably won't hurt to leave that there... :rinse :repeat

** yeah, like that'd never happen...

Re:Tall statement

[pixelpusher220]

the old adage:

Good, Fast, Cheap

Pick any two.

Snakeoil

[A beautiful mind]

The language is either not Turing complete and then mostly useless for practical general computing, or it is Turing complete and then it provides no real security.

It might avoid some class of problems, but it will never free a programmer from having to clarify his/her intentions. Security is an abstraction-level free problem, meaning that it equally can be an issue at the x86_64 instruction set level and also at the level of high level contractual/social agreements that code has to handle.

As Bruce Schneier said long ago: Security is not a product; it's a process.

Security is also a tradeoff between a system being secure and usable. You can make things more secure by allowing a system to do less. I'm not saying that this new programming language is useless, but it all comes down to a careful description of the language. If the creators advocate it as a secure programming language that makes code written in it secure by default, then they are almost certainly wrong and will quickly become a laughingstock. On the other hand, if they market it as a language that avoids or makes it impossible to commit certain classes of security problems, as a language that pays attention to it's core code for security issues and as a language that makes it clear security is a mindset, then I see it being useful.