Wednesday / CS Seminar
October 28 / 11:00 AM
Hybrid / Mudd 3514
Speaker
Farzaneh Derakhshan, Northwestern University
Talk Title
Quantitative Security Guarantees for Concurrent Systems
Abstract
Modern software is built from components that interact with each other: processes exchanging messages, threads sharing GPU memory, and AI agents coordinating with one another. Classical security guarantees for such systems are all-or-nothing: a program either leaks secret information or it does not. In practice, however, almost every system leaks some information, so the real question is how much.
In this talk, I will present a type-based (and logic-based) compositional approach to measuring information leakage in concurrent programs. The centerpiece is our recent work on session types, a type discipline that describes communication protocols of message-passing processes. I will show how well-typed probabilistic programs give rise to probability distributions over communication traces, and explain how these distributions let us measure how much an active attacker can gain by interacting with a system: observing the public communications and adapting her strategy based on the messages she receives from the program. I will then briefly discuss how similar ideas, via relational reasoning, can be adapted to GPU programs, where our relational Hoare logic bounds the difference in resource usage between executions with different secrets, quantifying resource usage as a side channel in CUDA kernels. I will close with future directions on extending these guarantees to systems that mix verified and tested components, including black boxes such as third-party services, whose internals we cannot verify but whose interactions we can observe.
Biography
Farzaneh Derakhshan is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University. Her research is in programming languages, formal methods, and language-based security, with a focus on quantitative and compositional reasoning about concurrent systems. Before joining Northwestern, she was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology and a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, where she also received her PhD in Pure and Applied Logic, advised by Frank Pfenning. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming at venues including POPL, LICS, OOPSLA, CSF, and ESOP, and is supported by the National Science Foundation.
Research Area/Interest: programming languages, formal methods, language-based security
Cost: free
Wynante R Charles
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