Intent as a Secure Design Primitive

Intent lies at the heart of technology design, development, and use. As such, intent is a secure design primitive. We posit that securing a technology requires enforcing the various actors' intents throughout the technology's lifecycle. This tenet of secure design is particularly relevant for the Internet of Things (IoT) context, where intent violations and intent mismatches all too often manifest in unprecedented security vulnerabilities. In this chapter, we discuss two security paradigms for securing the IoT by preserving designer and developer intents: language‐theoretic security (LangSec) and ELF‐based access control (ELFbac). We also demonstrate how these two paradigms can be used in tandem to harden the AMQP protocol used for the IoT, and we discuss evaluation techniques.