Related papers: Secure System Virtualization: End-to-End Verificat…
Separation kernels are fundamental software of safety and security-critical systems, which provide to their hosted applications spatial and temporal separation as well as controlled information flows among partitions. The application of…
Separation kernels provide temporal/spatial separation and controlled information flow to their hosted applications. They are introduced to decouple the analysis of applications in partitions from the analysis of the kernel itself. More…
Virtualization plays an essential role in providing security to computational systems by isolating execution environments. Many software solutions, called hypervisors, have been proposed to provide virtualization capabilities. However, only…
Multi- and many-core processors are becoming increasingly popular in embedded systems. Many of these processors now feature hardware virtualization capabilities, such as the ARM Cortex A15, and x86 processors with Intel VT-x or AMD-V…
Protecting commodity operating systems and applications against malware and targeted attacks has proven to be difficult. In recent years, virtualization has received attention from security researchers who utilize it to harden existing…
This paper outlines the design of `Quest-V', which is implemented as a collection of separate kernels operating together as a distributed system on a chip. Quest-V uses virtualization techniques to isolate kernels and prevent local faults…
A promising approach for designing critical embedded systems is based on virtualization technologies and multi-core platforms. These enable the deployment of both real-time and general-purpose systems with different criticalities in a…
In this work we present the Secure Machine, SeM for short, a CPU architecture extension for secure computing. SeM uses a small amount of in-chip additional hardware that monitors key communication channels inside the CPU chip, and only acts…
Commodity applications contain more and more combinations of interacting components (user, application, library, and system) and exhibit increasingly diverse tradeoffs between isolation, performance, and programmability. We argue that the…
Monolithic operating systems, where all kernel functionality resides in a single, shared address space, are the foundation of most mainstream computer systems. However, a single flaw, even in a non-essential part of the kernel (e.g., device…
The kernel is the most safety- and security-critical component of many computer systems, as the most severe bugs lead to complete system crash or exploit. It is thus desirable to guarantee that a kernel is free from these bugs using formal…
Confidential computing is a key technology for isolating high-assurance applications from the large amounts of untrusted code typical in modern systems. Existing confidential computing systems cannot be certified for use in critical…
Modern processors are increasingly featuring multiple cores, as well as support for hardware virtualization. While these processors are common in desktop and server-class computing, they are less prevalent in embedded and real-time systems.…
Virtualization has rapidly become a go-to technology for increasing efficiency in the data center. With virtualization technologies providing tremendous flexibility, even disparate architectures may be deployed on a single machine without…
Computer systems often provide hardware support for isolation mechanisms like privilege levels, virtual memory, or enclaved execution. Over the past years, several successful software-based side-channel attacks have been developed that…
Confidential computing safeguards sensitive computations from untrusted clouds, with Confidential Virtual Machines (CVMs) providing a secure environment for guest OS. However, CVMs often come with large and vulnerable operating system…
The endless stream of vulnerabilities urgently calls for principled mitigation to confine the effect of exploitation. However, the monolithic architecture of commodity OS kernels, like the Linux kernel, allows an attacker to compromise the…
Virtualization technologies allow multiple tenants to share physical resources with a degree of security and isolation that cannot be guaranteed by mere containerization. Further, virtualization allows protected transparent introspection of…
Virtualization is a technique that allows multiple instances typically running different guest operating systems on top of single physical hardware. A hypervisor, a layer of software running on top of the host operating system, typically…
Isolation is a critical property for shared infrastructure to limit exposure and interference among simultaneous running workloads. Cloud providers use different isolation mechanisms such as full Virtual Machines, microVMs, Linux…