Provide Security Guarantees Research Articles

Guest editorial for special issue on embedded system security

Embedded system security is an emerging area of research and development that addresses the problem of security vulnerabilities in embedded systems. The wide deployment of embedded systems as part of our infrastructure and daily life makes this an important topic. From a technical point of view, providing security in embedded systems presents a interesting challenge because their implementation and deployment characteristic open novel avenues of attack. To provide security guarantees, suitable countermeasures and improved system designs are being developed. This special issue contains six articles that present an overview and recent research results related to embedded system security. The articles were selected from a number of papers that were presented at the Second Workshop on Embedded System Security (WESS’07), which was held on October 4, 2007 in conjunction with EMSOFT/ESWEEK 2007 in Salzburg, Austria. In addition, a tutorial article was added to provide an introduction to embedded system security as well as an overview on related research. The combination of these articles represents an interesting cross-section of topics in embedded system security research:

The JavaSeal Mobile Agent Kernel

Mobile agents show promise as a new distributed programming paradigm in which locality plays a central role—programs that are able to move closer to their data can overcome limitations of connectivity, latency or bandwidth. Mobility also enables distributed systems to evolve; for instance, the deployment of a new service over a network can be programmed as part of the service itself. Of course, moving programs introduces new challenges. One of these is related to program structure: How much of a computation should be moved? Where are the boundaries between mobile and immobile entities drawn? A second challenge is to provide security guarantees: How can the actions of mobile agent be controlled? And what kinds of security properties can we realistically expect to enforce? We answer these questions within the framework of the JavaSeal mobile agent system kernel. JavaSeal provides several abstractions for constructing agent systems in Java. Our basic building block is the seal which is a nested encapsulated computation fragment with sharply delineated boundaries. Strands are sequential threads of computation bound to a seal. Capsules transfer passive seals and objects over communication channels; Traffic over channels is regulated by portals. We argue that these abstractions are sufficient to program secure mobile agent systems. An electronic commerce application built over our kernel is used as a demonstrator.