amit levy

Assistant Professor Computer Science Princeton University amit@amitlevy.com GPG Key

I’m particularly excited about developing and deploying research beyond publication. The active projects below may are those that have ongoing research associated with them, or are past the point of the main research goals but I still hack on them actively.

Active

User-centric cloud computing

Less may be more in the cloud

Foundational Secure Systems

Tock OS

Low-power microcontrollers are increasingly prevalent in the Internet of Things. These devices have extreme memory constraints—typically 16-512 kB of RAM. They also lack hardware features, such as virtual memory, that are integral to the design of modern operating systems. These constraints preclude traditional isolation abstractions, such as processes or microkernel services, leading to systems in which every line of code is fully trusted.

The result is that device manufacturers cannot safely run third-party applications on their microcontroller systems. Worse, these siloed devices end up incorporating large quantities of third-party code anyway, in the form of open source libraries or device drivers. A bug in any of this code makes the whole system vulnerable to attackers. If the Internet of Things continues to grow as predicted, we risk ending up with vulnerable and siloed devices running the world around us.

Tock is a new operating system for microcontrollers. Tock makes it safe for end-users to run untrusted third-party applications and protects the kernel from buggy drivers. Tock isolates the memory and performance of applications using a preemptive process-like abstraction enforced in hardware by the MPU. The kernel is written in Rust and provides a type-safe API for building kernel components that ensures isolation of memory faults at virtually no runtime cost.

Previous

Hails

A small number of large web sites, such as Facebook, curate most user data online. On the surface, these sites are becoming software platforms by giving third-party applications access to some data via APIs. In practice, though, most data access is reserved for the platform itself since end-users have to trust third-party applications completely with whatever data the applications can access.

The web platform restricts which applications can access data, but not how applications use the data. For example, if Facebook allows a third-party application to access a user’s photos, it’s up to that application to make sure the photos are not displayed to other, unauthorized users. Is it possible to ensure end-user security policies are enforced end-to-end without restricting third-party applications’ capabilities?

One opportunity is a shift in how developers build and deploy web applications. Many developers are now deploying web applications on Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS), like Heroku, Amazon Beanstalk, and Google AppEngine. These platforms alleviate the need for developers to manage their own servers. In exchange, developers adhere to the platform’s programming conventions, such as choice of language, and build applications to work with databases and other services available on the platform.

Perhaps the deployment platform can enforce security policies on user data end-to-end? Instead of restricting which applications can access data, the trusted platform can track data across applications. This matches the policies users actually care about: who can see their data, not which developer’s code can manipulate or access it along the way.

Hails is a framework specifically designed to address the developer barriers erected by sites such as Facebook. In Hails, third-party applications run on the platform’s servers instead of servers run by the developer. The trusted platform ensures that applications that have seen sensitive data can’t communicate with users, files, databases, etc., that are not authorized to see that data. However, all functionality is implemented by the applications themselves. For example, we created a GitHub-like code sharing platform built entirely of untrusted applications.

Beetle

Mobile phones, wireless routers, and other gateway devices allow wireless peripherals to communicate with local and cloud applications using specialized networking protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy. Unfortunately, intuitively simple use cases, such as logging heart rate in one application while viewing it in another, are impossible. Current operating systems simply do not allow applications to share access to Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals safely, resulting in barriers for developers.

Fortunately, GATT, the application layer protocol Bluetooth Low Energy devices already use to communicate with applications, presents an opportunity. GATT is an ideal protocol for multiplexing access to devices. It has an attribute data-model. End-points perform operations such as GET, WRITE, and NOTIFY on the attributes. This is enough information for the operating system to let applications safely share access to peripherals without explicit coordination, and without changing the peripherals or the applications.

Beetle is a new hardware interface for Bluetooth Low Energy. Beetle interposes on the GATT protocol between applications and devices. The system can distinguish between, say, a command to discover peripheral capabilities or fetch a reading from one that unsubscribes from future sensor reading updates. As a result, Beetle allows shared access to peripherals from multiple applications, fine-grained access control to peripheral resources, and transparent access to peripherals over a network.

Because GATT is not specific to any particular class of peripheral devices, Beetle works with existing peripherals and applications without requiring the operating system to understand any specific peripheral’s functionality.

Stickler

Website publishers can derive enormous performance benefits and cost savings by directing traffic to their sites through content distribution networks (CDNs). However, publishers who use CDNs today must trust their CDN not to modify the site’s JavaScript, CSS, images or other media en route to end users. A CDN that violates this trust could inject ads into websites, downsample media to save bandwidth or, worse, inject malicious JavaScript code to steal user secrets it could not otherwise access. Stickler is a system for website publishers that guarantees the end-to-end authenticity of content served to end users while simultaneously allowing publishers to reap the benefits of CDNs. Crucially, Stickler achieves these guarantees without requiring modifications to the browser.

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