Johnny wants to build robust applications---ones which will withstand
attack. But no matter how hard he tries, the applications Johnny writes
have security holes. Experience shows that a large factor in Johnny's
failure is the system semantics on top of which his application
runs. These semantics are difficult for him to reason about, have
undefined and unspecified behaviors, require his application to use arcane
security interfaces, have hard-to-reason-about corner cases, and interact
poorly. The result is a system with almost no security guarantees.

Ethos is an operating system being developed at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, designed from the ground up to provide and make it
easier to reason about security properties. This talk will address some
particular interfaces in existing systems and show how Ethos improves
on the status quo.

And a bio:

Mike Petullo is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at
Chicago. He is working with Dr. Jon Solworth on Ethos, an Operating
System designed to provide application programmers with semantics that
make it easier to write secure code. Mike received a B.S. in Computer
Science from Drake University and a M.S. in Computer Science from
DePaul University. After graduating from UIC, Mike will be serving as an
instructor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department
at the United States Military Academy.