Language-Based Security: What’s Needed and Why

Language-based security leverages program analysis and program rewriting in enforcing security policies. The approach promises efficient enforcement of fine-grained access-control policies, and it seems to require a trusted computing base of only modest size. This talk discusses progress and prospects for the area. Traditional security problems viewed through the lens of programming language research invites novel uses of various well understood results from the area. It also provides reason to revisit assumptions and research directions that have been driving forces in languages research.