Etudiant BHUMIKA Goyal

Research activity

The Linux kernel relies heavily on structures to maintain information about different system components and to enable interaction between system services. The central role played by these structures in the execution of the Linux kernel makes them an obvious target for attackers. The goal of our project will be to add annotations when possible to the declarations of structures, to protect their contents by limiting or eliminating their mutability. These annotations will include both const, which provides full protection, and e.g., __ro_after_init, that has recently been added to the Linux kernel to make a structure immutable after the initialization phase. Our work will be based on the use of Coccinelle, developed by the Whisper team at UPMC, to find opportunities for the use of these annotations.