Towards secure IoT programming in Haskell

Abstract

IoT applications are often developed in programming languages with low-level abstractions, where a seemingly innocent mistake might lead to severe security vulnerabilities. Current IoT development tools make it hard to identify these vulnerabilities as they do not provide end-to-end guarantees about how data flows within and between appliances. In this work we present Haski, an embedded domain specific language in Haskell (eDSL) for secure programming of IoT devices. Haski enables developers to write Haskell programs that generate C code without falling into many of C’s pitfalls. Haski is designed after the synchronous programming language Lustre, and sports a backwards compatible information-flow control extension to restrict how sensitive data is propagated and modified within the application. We present a novel eDSL design which uses recursive monadic bindings and allows a natural use of functions and pattern-matching in Haskell to write Haski programs. To showcase Haski, we implement a simple smart house controller where communication is done via low-energy Bluetooth on Zephyr OS.