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Swift: making web applications secure by construction

Swift is a language-based approach to building web applications that are secure by construction. Swift applications are written in the Jif language, a Java-based language that incorporates "security-typing" to manage the flow of information within an application. The Swift compiler automatically partitions the application code into a client-side JavaScript application and a server-side Java application, with code placement constrained by declarative information flow policies that strongly enforce the confidentiality and integrity of server-side information.

Swift was recently featured in the "Research Highlights" section of the Communications of the ACM, as a condensed version of an earlier conference paper. The original conference paper is Stephen Chong, Jed Liu, Andrew C. Myers, Xin Qi, K. Vikram, Lantian Zheng, and Xin Zheng, Secure web applications via automatic partitioning, Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP'07), pages 31–44, October 2007.

Jif has been mentioned previously on LtU here and here.

Site problems

As many have noticed we had a few problems with the site yesterday. Thanks to everyone who emailed to let me know they were experiencing difficulties.

We think the problem has been solved, and that the site should be stable now.