A short tale on protecting the long tail

We live in an ever more connected world, surrounded by systems that we depend on for daily life. The security of these systems is paramount. This talk focuses on two research efforts to provide high-assurance protections to the legacy install-base–or the systems in the field today that are a critical part of our lives. First, we discuss how we can defend possibly vulnerable legacy software (from both source and binary) against broad classes of attack, and how this level of protection alone is not sufficient. Even with each individual component or device independently secured, the composition and configuration of these devices can have a significant impact on the security of the overall system. We explore a new research effort that focuses on how we configure the devices we buy off-the-shelf and compose them into systems we rely on.