M. Frans Kaashoek is a full professor in MIT's EECS department and a member
of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he coleads
the parallel and distributed operating systems group
(http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/). He received a PhD (1992) from the Vrije
Universiteit (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) for his work on group
communication in the Amoeba distributed operating system, under the
supervision of A.S. Tanenbaum. Frans's principal field of interest is
designing and building computer systems. His past work includes the
exokernel operating system, the Click modular router, the RON overlay, the
self-certifying file system, the Chord distributed hash table, and the
Asbestos secure operating system.  Frans is a member of the National Academy
of Engineering and the recipient of several awards, including the inaugural
ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award for demonstrating creativity and innovation in
operating systems research.

Abstract:
The recent successes of server-side applications (e.g., Google and Facebook
applications) hint that tomorrow's computing platform might not be the local
desktop but rather the extensible remote Web site.
Unfortunately, these new server-side platforms, built on conventional
operating systems, are committing the same security mistakes already
ossified in today's insecure desktops.

This talk presents how to secure both today's Web sites and tomorrow's Web
computing platforms with a new OS technique called Decentralized Information
Flow Control (DIFC).  A DIFC system tracks the flow of secret data as it is
copied from file to file and communicated from process to process.  In the
end, the OS lets modules known as "declassifiers" legislate policies for
secret data exiting to the network.  DIFC provides better security than
standard OSes because it allows developers to concentrate security-critical
code in small, audit-friendly declassifiers, which remain small and
contained even as the overall system balloons with new features.