Forum Topic: Security

Talk given by Ivan Godard – 2014-03-21 at Google.


NOTE: the slides require genuine Microsoft PowerPoint to view; open source PowerPoint clones are unable to show the animations, which are essential to the slide content. If you do not have access to PowerPoint then watch the video, which shows the slides as intended.

Slides: Powerpoint (.pptx)

Security and reliability on the Mill CPU:
Naughty, naughty; bad program, mustn’t do that!

Software bugs have always been a problem, but in recent years bugs have become an even more serious concern as they are exploited to breach system security for privacy violation, theft, and even terrorism or acts of war.

The Mill CPU architecture addresses software robustness in three basic ways: it makes impossible many errors and exploits; it detects and reports many errors and exploits that cannot be prevented; and it survives and recovers from many detected errors and exploits. None of these ways involve loss of performance.

The talk describes some of the Mill CPU features that defend against well-known error and exploit patterns. Examples include:

  • a call stack structure that cannot be overwritten to redirect execution on return
  • an instruction format that makes “return-oriented programming” exploits very difficult
  • an inter-process protection mechanism that lets applications, server code, and operating systems follow “least privilege” principles

These features will be discussed in the context of the overall Mill CPU security model, which defends not only against known errors and exploits, but also against unanticipated future failures.

Speaker bio

Ivan Godard has designed, implemented or led the teams for 11 compilers for a variety of languages and targets, an operating system, an object-oriented database, and four instruction set architectures. He participated in the revision of Algol68 and is mentioned in its Report, was on the Green team that won the Ada language competition, designed the Mary family of system implementation languages, and was founding editor of the Machine Oriented Languages Bulletin. He is a Member Emeritus of IFIPS Working Group 2.4 (Implementation languages) and was a member of the committee that produced the IEEE and ISO floating-point standard 754-2011.

Ivan is currently CTO at Mill Computing, a startup now emerging from stealth mode. Mill Computing has developed the Mill, a clean-sheet rethink of general-purpose CPU architectures. The Mill is the subject of this talk.