CS 261 Homework 1

Instructions

Briefly sketch answers to each of the following problems. A few short sentences should be enough for the first two questions. Feel free to use incomplete sentences if you like.

This problem set is due Thursday, 30 September. Turn in your answers, in paper, at the beginning of class that Thursday. Please include both your name and your WebReview username at the top of the first page of your solutions.

Work on your own for this homework. You may use any source you like (including other papers or textbooks), but if you use any source not discussed in class, you must cite it.

Question 1

Prof. Beanstalk makes the following claim:

Stack smashing attacks are made possible by the fact that stacks grow downwards (towards smaller addresses) on most popular modern architectures. Therefore, future architectures should ensure that the stack grows upwards; this would provide a good defense against buffer overruns.
Do you agree or disagree? Why?

Question 2

As we saw in class, C programs are commonly prone to buffer-overflow attacks. What changes could be made to the C compiler to help protect against (or prevent) these attacks?

This is a brainstorming question; give as many good answers as you can.

Question 3

This question asks you to design and implement a safe HTML filter. I want some way to safely view HTML pages from the web, and this method better not harm my machine even through these pages come from an untrusted source, and even though my web browser is too complex for me to have full faith in its ability to safely handle totally untrusted web pages. You're going to write me a sanitizing filter that I can use something like this:

./htmlfilter < scarywebstuff.html > safe.html
mozilla safe.html
I have two goals for this composed system:
Security:
This procedure must not, under any circumstances, cause any harm to my system. Ideally, using this procedure to view web pages should be as harmless as viewing an ASCII text file with, say, /bin/more; note that even if an attacker supplies the entire contents of a text file, viewing it with /bin/more cannot harm my machine, so /bin/more is in some sense the gold standard. In particular, viewing untrusted files using your HTML filter and my favorite web browser should not cause any lasting side effects to my machine, and it should not leak any confidential information (e.g., the contents of files on my hard disk; or, information about what I'm viewing in another window with the same browser). Your scheme must not only be secure; it must also be verifiably secure. You will have to provide an assurance argument why it is reasonable to believe that your filter achieves this goal.
Functional:
In an ideal world, your filter would allow me to view as much of the content on the web page as possible -- except where this would conflict with the previous requirement, in which case security is more important than functionality. For instance, a filter that ignores its input and always outputs the empty HTML page is not very useful. Thus, your solution should be at least minimally useful for viewing the text content of web pages. However, I don't really care whether I get to see pretty pictures, dancing pigs and other fancy decorative stuff or not. Also, feel free to keep your implementation simple and to omit support for complex functionality. This is intended only as a proof of concept exercise -- no need for feature-complete production code. To keep this tractable as a homework question, you can err on the side of omitting functionality (though it might be nice if your approach can be generalized to support as much functionality as possible).
Security matters more than functionality; my threshold for security will be pretty high, while my threshold for functionality will be very low.

I want you to come up with a design, implement it, document your basic architecture and assurance argument, and submit both the document and the code. Your submission should contain at least three files:

README
Document the basic architecture you've used and the theory of operation for your scheme. Sketch the assurance argument why one should expect your scheme to be secure. This should be an ASCII text file, and it doesn't have to be too lengthy; a page or so should be enough.
Makefile
A Makefile with everything needed to compile your program. If I run make, it should do everything needed to compile your program and finally generate in the current directory an executable file called htmlfilter. This program should read an untrusted HTML file from stdin and write a sanitized HTML file to stdout.
Source files
Include any source files needed to build the executable. Don't include the executable itself; I will run make myself. You can use pretty much any well-supported language you like (e.g., C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, ML, OCaml, bash script) as long as it will work on my Linux system. However, to avoid any difficulties, please take care to make your program as portable as possible. Feel free to keep it simple. If you are writing more than a few hundred of lines of code, you're probably working too hard.
From within this directory, run
tar cf your-username.tar .
where your-username denotes your two-letter username for the WebReview system. Then, email me this file as an attachment by the due date. Also, print out the README file and attach it to your homework solution that you turn in to class.

Yes, I will be running your programs. Because I will be using automated scripts to do so, I ask you to follow the above instructions carefully. To help demonstrate the format, here is reference code that demonstrates the required format: ref.tar. (Feel free to steal from this code in your implementation, if you like.)