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A comment on L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research and deployment. Parent comment

Re:L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research an... by tptacek on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @12:31PM (#12540788)
Can you describe this with an example of a realistic use of L4-enabled sandboxing for a single-function IoT device?

(I've done some L4 work so you don't need to spend a lot of time explaining.)

General purpose OSs like iOS? No question: L4 is a major win. But that's not what the discussion here is really about.

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Re:L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research an... by nanolith on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @06:24PM (#12543911)
Case in point: cryptography, authentication, and authorization are each very sensitive operations which are prone to both gadget attacks and sidechannel attacks. Sandboxing these operations by creating well-defined boundaries between application code and these algorithms and protocols can ensure that application level bugs cannot creep into these critical services.

Consider, for instance, that it is possible to separate TCP/IP or wireless protocol stacks from authentication code so that, for instance, a packet fragmentation bug can't be exploited to influence authentication level decisions. This is classical defense in depth strategy, but enforced through both runtime and formal methods.

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Re:L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research an... by indolering on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @07:20PM (#12544194)
You wouldn't, SEL4 isn't designed for embedded systems. That's what NICTA's eChronos [1] is for : )

1: http://ts.data61.csiro.au/projects/TS/echronos/

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Re:L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research an... by nickpsecurity on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @10:31PM (#12544997)
seL4 is designed for embeddee systems. That's why it mainly targeted ARM. Gernot Heiser even said so. I believe eChronos is just targeted for embedded devices with more constrained hardware.
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Re:L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research an... by indolering on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @03:56PM (#12551662)
> I believe eChronos is just targeted for embedded devices with more constrained hardware.

I guess it all depends on which meaning of IoT and embedded you are using.

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Re:L4 microkernels: The lessons from 20 years of research an... by nickpsecurity on Wednesday September 21, 2016 @04:48PM (#12552080)
No MMU is usually the differentiating constraint when there's two RTOS's. I dont use IoT because it's a BS buzzword.
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