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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…

Modern smartphones are complex systems in which control over phone resources is exercised by phone manufacturers, OS vendors, and users. These stakeholders have diverse and often competing interests. Barring some exceptions, users entrust…

The kernels of operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and MacOS are vulnerable to control-flow hijacking. Defenses exist, but many require efficient intra-address-space isolation. Execute-only memory, for example, requires read…

Since its debut, SGX has been used in many applications, e.g., secure data processing. However, previous systems usually assume a trusted enclave and ignore the security issues caused by an untrusted enclave. For instance, a vulnerable (or…

ARM TrustZone technology is widely used to provide Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) for mobile devices. However, most TEE OSes are implemented as monolithic kernels. In such designs, device drivers, kernel services and kernel modules…

Intel SGX and hypervisors isolate non-privileged programs from other software, ensuring confidentiality and integrity. However, side-channel attacks continue to threaten Intel SGX's security, enabling malicious OS to manipulate PTE present…

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…

Interactive theorem proving software is typically designed around a trusted proof-checking kernel, the sole system component capable of authenticating theorems. Untrusted automation procedures reside outside of the kernel, and drive it to…

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…

With the alarming rate of security advisories and privacy concerns on connected devices, there is an urgent need for strong isolation guarantees in resource-constrained devices that demand very lightweight solutions. However, the status quo…

Modern processors can offer hardware primitives that allow a process to run in isolation. These primitives implement a trusted execution environment (TEE) in which a program can run such that the integrity and confidentiality of its…

Application security traditionally strongly relies upon security of the underlying operating system. However, operating systems often fall victim to software attacks, compromising security of applications as well. To overcome this…

In this paper, we present PXoM, a practical technique to seamlessly retrofit XoM into stripped binaries on the x86-64 platform. As handling the mixture of code and data is a well-known challenge for XoM, most existing methods require the…

Hardware-assisted trusted execution environments (TEEs) are critical building blocks of many modern applications. However, they have a one-way isolation model that introduces a semantic gap between a TEE and its outside world. This lack of…

Many smartphones now deploy conventional operating systems, so the rootkit attacks so prevalent on desktop and server systems are now a threat to smartphones. While researchers have advocated using virtualization to detect and prevent…

Almost all modern hardware, from phone SoCs to high-end servers with accelerators, contain memory translation and protection hardware like IOMMUs, firewalls, and lookup tables which make it impossible to reason about, and enforce protection…

With the improvements in computing technologies, edge devices in the Internet-of-Things have become more complex. The enabler technology for these complex systems are powerful application core processors with operating system support, such…

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…

In this paper, we propose a new secure machine learning inference platform assisted by a small dedicated security processor, which will be easier to protect and deploy compared to today's TEEs integrated into high-performance processors.…

Enclaves have emerged as a particularly compelling primitive to implement trusted execution environments: strongly isolated sensitive user-mode processes in a largely untrusted software environment. While the threat models employed by…