About Jon A. Solworth

Security, Privacy & Systems; chief something-or-other at Ethos OS; Associate Prof at UIC; pro-democracy. He/him.

My research is in the intersection of security&privacy and systems. In particular, the impact of system’s semantics on S&P. Perhaps the easiest way of understanding this is via analogy with programming languages: for example you can have a buffer overflow in C and not in a suitably high-level language. The latter prevents all buffer overflows (even if the programmer doesn’t know what a buffer overflow is) while in the former case it is not possible to find all the buffer overflows due to Rice’s theorem.

We have created an Operating System called Ethos whose semantics eliminates many security holes. In Ethos, all files and network communications are typed, all networking is encrypted, m2m authentication is done by public key, and authentication infrastructure is distributed. Ethos systematically eliminates pitfalls which all to often result in security holes.

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