Related papers: Case Study: Securing MMU-less Linux Using CHERI
Over the last years, security kernels have played a promising role in reshaping the landscape of platform security on today's ubiquitous embedded devices. Security kernels, such as separation kernels, enable constructing high-assurance…
Security architectures providing Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) have been an appealing research subject for a wide range of computer systems, from low-end embedded devices to powerful cloud servers. The goal of these architectures is…
Shared cache resources in multi-core processors are vulnerable to cache side-channel attacks. Recently proposed defenses have their own caveats: Randomization-based defenses are vulnerable to the evolving attack algorithms besides relying…
Micro-controller units (MCUs) implement the de facto interface between the physical and digital worlds. As a consequence, they appear in a variety of sensing/actuation applications, from smart personal spaces to complex industrial control…
The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…
Modern applications are increasingly advanced and complex, and inevitably contain exploitable software bugs despite the ongoing efforts. The applications today often involve processing of sensitive information. However, the lack of…
While there exist many isolation mechanisms that are available to cloud service providers, including virtual machines, containers, etc., the problem of side-channel increases in importance as a remaining security vulnerability, particularly…
Memory safety remains a critical and widely violated property in reality. Numerous defense techniques have been proposed and developed but most of them are not applied or enabled by default in production-ready environment due to their…
Recent proliferation of embedded systems has generated a bold new paradigm, known as open embedded systems. While traditional embedded systems provide only closed base applications (natively-installed software) to users, open embedded…
The CHERI architecture equips conventional RISC ISAs with significant architectural extensions that provide a hardware-enforced mechanism for memory protection and software compartmentalisation. Architectural capabilities replace…
Confidential Computing (CC) has received increasing attention in recent years as a mechanism to protect user data from untrusted operating systems (OSes). Existing CC solutions hide confidential memory from the OS and/or encrypt it to…
System Management Mode (SMM) is the highest-privileged operating mode of x86 and x86-64 processors. Through SMM exploitation, attackers can tamper with the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware, disabling the security…
The advent of distributed computing systems will offer great flexibility for application workloads, while also imposing more attention to security, where the future advent and adoption of quantum technology can introduce new security…
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…
Context: The integration of Rust into kernel development is a transformative endeavor aimed at enhancing system security and reliability by leveraging Rust's strong memory safety guarantees. Objective: We aim to find the current advances in…
This article presents a hardware-based memory isolation solution for constrained devices. Existing solutions target high-end embedded systems (typically ARM Cortex-A with a Memory Management Unit, MMU) such as seL4 or Pip (formally verified…
The efficacy of address space layout randomization has been formally demonstrated in a shared-memory model by Abadi et al., contingent on specific assumptions about victim programs. However, modern operating systems, implementing layout…
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…
Memory Protection Keys for Userspace (PKU) is a recent hardware feature that allows programs to assign virtual memory pages to protection domains, and to change domain access permissions using inexpensive, unprivileged instructions. Several…
In monolithic operating systems, the kernel is the piece of code that executes with the highest privileges and has control over all the software running on a host. A successful attack against an operating system's kernel means a total and…