Related papers: Securing Monolithic Kernels using Compartmentaliza…

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…

The Operating System (OS) kernel is foundational in modern computing, especially with the proliferation of diverse computing devices. However, its development also comes with vulnerabilities that can lead to severe security breaches. Kernel…

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…

While there is a large body of work on analyzing concurrency related software bugs and developing techniques for detecting and patching them, little attention has been given to concurrency related security vulnerabilities. The two are…

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…

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…

The framework of Bodlaender et al. (ICALP 2008) and Fortnow and Santhanam (STOC 2008) allows us to exclude the existence of polynomial kernels for a range of problems under reasonable complexity-theoretical assumptions. However, there are…

In the framework of computational complexity and in an effort to define a more natural reduction for problems of equivalence, we investigate the recently introduced kernel reduction, a reduction that operates on each element of a pair…

The monolithic nature of widely used commodity operating systems means that vulnerabilities in one software component potentially compromise the entire kernel. Formally verifying these systems, or redesigning them altogether as…

Decomposing large systems into smaller components with limited privileges has long been recognized as an effective means to minimize the impact of exploits. Despite historical roots, demonstrated benefits, and a plethora of research efforts…

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…

The security of applications hinges on the trustworthiness of the operating system, as applications rely on the OS to protect code and data. As a result, multiple protections for safeguarding the integrity of kernel code and data are being…

By removing irrelevant and redundant features, feature selection aims to find a good representation of the original features. With the prevalence of unlabeled data, unsupervised feature selection has been proven effective in alleviating the…

Timekeeping is a fundamental component of modern computing; however, the security of system time remains an overlooked attack surface, leaving critical systems vulnerable to manipulation.

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…

Compartmentalization is a form of defensive software design in which an application is broken down into isolated but communicating components. Retrofitting compartmentalization into existing applications is often thought to be expensive…

One of the most elusive types of malware in recent times that pose significant challenges in the computer security system is the kernel-level rootkits. The kernel-level rootkits can hide its presence and malicious activities by modifying…

There are existing standard solvers for tackling discrete optimization problems. However, in practice, it is uncommon to apply them directly to the large input space typical of this class of problems. Rather, the input is preprocessed to…

Compartmentalization effectively prevents initial corruption from turning into a successful attack. This paper presents O2C, a pioneering system designed to enforce OS kernel compartmentalization on the fly. It not only provides immediate…

The use of kernel functions is a common technique to extract important features from data sets. A quantum computer can be used to estimate kernel entries as transition amplitudes of unitary circuits. Quantum kernels exist that, subject to…