Protection Analysis: Final Report

The Protection Analysis project was initiated at ISI by ARPA IPTO to further understand operating system security vulnerabilities and, where possible, identify automatable techniques for detecting such vulnerabilities in existing system software. The primary goal of the project was to make protection evaluation both more effective and more economical by decomposing it into more manageable and methodical subtasks so as to drastically reduce the requirement for protection expertise and make it as independent as possible of the skills and motivation of the actual individuals involved. The project focused on near-term solutions to the problem of improving the security of existing and future operating systems in an attempt to have some impact on the security of the systems which would be in use over the next ten years.