A Tale of Two Kernels: Towards Ending Kernel Hardening Wars with Split Kernel [pdf]

Re:A Tale of Two Kernels: Towards Ending Kernel Hardening Wa... by nickpsecurity on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @07:17PM (#9775095)

There's been many highly-secure virtualization prototypes or production systems that leveraged tiny kernels with minimally-complex trusted software. Kernel-mode code for modern ones was around 10Kloc. On a virtualizable architecture, this is way easier to do than a whole OS given the complexity of the latter. Plus, it's best to entrust the best security engineers and software engineers to build it with similar to certify it rather than "a worldwide collection of software engineers" unqualified for the job.

Right people, right tools, right architecture, and right processes for knocking out defects. That's what it takes. Virtualization's well-studied enough to tackle it. Only one's trying in FOSS that I'm aware of are L4 community: esp TU Dresden Nizza architecture w/ L4 Linux, OK Labs OKL4/seL4 / OK Linux, and GenodeOS on Nova microhypervisor or OKL4. Google separation kernel, Nizza and Genode architectures to see what I mean.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Tale of Two Kernels: Towards Ending Kernel Hardening Wa... by vezzy-fnord on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @08:17PM (#9775259)

I'm aware of that. I was mostly responding to the specific notion of "non-C OS running Docker containers", which is asinine.

The research OS space is mostly doomed to languish in obscurity, but it seems like MirageOS just might stand a chance.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Tale of Two Kernels: Towards Ending Kernel Hardening Wa... by nickpsecurity on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @09:02PM (#9775404)

I totally agree on MirageOS. Very exciting work applying good principles to the container concept. Work that's gotten noticed and might get used widespread one day. A situation so rare it's worth a toast to them! Lol.

[ Parent | on HN ]