Guarantees in Software Security

We review general approaches to reason about the security of a software system and reflect upon the guarantees they provide. We introduce a taxonomy of fundamental challenges towards the provision of guarantees, and discuss how these challenges are routinely exploited to attack a system in spite of credible assurances about the absence of such bugs. It is only when we identify, study, and acknowledge the flaws in our current reasoning systems today that we can develop effective mitigation strategies in the future. To this end, we finally propose a research programme whose goal it is to tackle the software security challenges of this decade.