Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems

Swift, Michael M.; Bershad, Brian N.; Levy, Henry M.

doi:10.1145/1047915.1047919

Cited by 192 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…Hardware‐based protection techniques . Nooks relies on a page‐based memory protection to protect the OS kernel from driver failure. For a similar purpose, Mondrix employs a segment‐based memory protection to isolate kernel modules from the OS kernel with fine granularity.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One effective way to defend against kernel modules exploitation is to provide an isolation mechanism to isolate a kernel module (eg, a device driver) from the rest of the kernel and then confine its execution behavior. In the past few years,() lots of isolation mechanisms have been developed. For example, Nooks and Mondrix can isolate the OS kernel from driver failures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the past few years,() lots of isolation mechanisms have been developed. For example, Nooks and Mondrix can isolate the OS kernel from driver failures. Nexus can enforce domain‐specific rules to prevent drivers from malicious modifications to kernel data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A policy‐centric approach to protecting OS kernel from vulnerable LKMs

Tian

Xiong

et al. 2018

Softw Pract Exp

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Loadable kernel modules (LKMs) that contain vulnerabilities are a big threat to modern operating systems (OSs). The primary reason is that there is no protection mechanism inside the kernel space when the LKM is executed. As a result, kernel module exploitation can seriously affect the OS kernel security. Although many protection systems have been developed to address this problem in the past few years, there still remain some challenges: (1) How to automatically generate a security policy before the kernel module is enforced? (2) How to properly mediate the interactions between the kernel module and the OS kernel without modifications on the existing OS, hardware, and kernel module structure? To address these challenges, we present LKM guard (LKMG), a policy-centric system that can protect commodity OS kernel from vulnerable LKMs. Compared with previous systems, LKMG is able to generate a security policy from a kernel module and then enforce the policy during the run time. Generally, the working process of LKMG can be divided into 2 stages. First, we utilize static analysis to extract the kernel code and data access patterns from a kernel module's source code and then combine these patterns with the related memory address information to generate a security policy. Second, by leveraging the hardware-assisted virtualization technology, LKMG isolates the kernel module from the rest of the kernel and then enforces the kernel module's execution to obey the derived policy. The experiments show that our system can defend against various attacks launched by the compromised kernel module effectively with moderate performance cost.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A policy‐centric approach to protecting OS kernel from vulnerable LKMs

Tian

Xiong

et al. 2018

Softw Pract Exp

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“…The quality requirement, reliability of the operating system can be achieved if the device driver failure doesn't occur; performance can be achieved if no errors are generated during the execution of different programs; reliability is achieved if the operating system is able to recover from failures and errors [45]. In operating systems the performance factor is given less priority to other dimensions in comparison to real time systems.…”

Section: Operating Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Quality of Open Source Software

2005

The ROI From Software Quality

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Quality and security of software are key factors in the software development. This thesis deals with the quality of open source software (OSS for short) and different questions that are related with open source and close source software has discussed in the thesis proposal. Open source software is a process by which we can produce cheap and qualitative software and its source could be re-use in the development of the software. Close source software is more expensive than open source software and we can not re-use its source code, so there should be a way by which cheap and qualitative software should be produced. This thesis describes that how the quality of the open source software can be evaluated and increased. There are different factors which are helpful to increase the software quality these factors are low cycle time, low cost and small size of software. These factors are also helpful for the development of software product according to the requirement of clients and the users of that software. This thesis also describes the security and performance of close and open source software and it also analyze different software development processes. The quality of OSS can be increased by use of best evaluation techniques, best quality measurement, best development tools and best development process. There are also many challenges for OSS, which it has to face for improvement of the quality of OSS. Initially there were many drawbacks in open source software but with the passage of time improvement has produced in it. This thesis also describes the compression, advantages and disadvantages of the close source and open source software.3

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“…It must produce these results in time and, to the extent possible, despite component failures. Worst-case execution-time (WCET) analyses (cf., [3,16,23]) are able to produce the former kind of guarantees whereas reliability techniques (cf., [22,4,7]) are designed to rule out negative effects from the latter. However, WCET analyses only produce guarantees in the form of upper bounds on the execution times of all involved components, which hold even in the most extreme situations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chiefly Symmetric: Results on the Scalability of Probabilistic Model Checking for Operating-System Code

Baier

Daum

Engel

et al. 2012

Electron. Proc. Theor. Comput. Sci.

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Reliability in terms of functional properties from the safety-liveness spectrum is an indispensable requirement of low-level operating-system (OS) code. However, with evermore complex and thus less predictable hardware, quantitative and probabilistic guarantees become more and more important. Probabilistic model checking is one technique to automatically obtain these guarantees. First experiences with the automated quantitative analysis of low-level operating-system code confirm the expectation that the naive probabilistic model checking approach rapidly reaches its limits when increasing the numbers of processes. This paper reports on our work-in-progress to tackle the state explosion problem for low-level OS-code caused by the exponential blow-up of the model size when the number of processes grows. We studied the symmetry reduction approach and carried out our experiments with a simple test-and-test-and-set lock case study as a representative example for a wide range of protocols with natural inter-process dependencies and long-run properties. We quickly see a state-space explosion for scenarios where inter-process dependencies are insignificant. However, once inter-process dependencies dominate the picture models with hundred and more processes can be constructed and analysed

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Improving the reliability of commodity operating systems

Cited by 192 publications

References 31 publications

A policy‐centric approach to protecting OS kernel from vulnerable LKMs

A policy‐centric approach to protecting OS kernel from vulnerable LKMs

The Quality of Open Source Software

Chiefly Symmetric: Results on the Scalability of Probabilistic Model Checking for Operating-System Code

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