Operating System Structures to Support Security and Reliable Software

Operating System Kernel Data Disambiguation to Support Security Analysis

It is very challenging to verify the integrity of Operating System (OS) kernel data because of its complex layout. In this paper, we address the problem of systematically generating an accurate kernel data definition for OSes without any prior knowledge of the OS kernel data. This definition accurately reflects the kernel data layout by resolving the pointer-based relations ambiguities between ...

Security Policy - Support of Operating System Updates for Server Applications

Verifying Operating System Security

A confined program is one which is unable to leak information to an unauthorized party or modify unauthorized resources. Confinement is an essential feature of any secure component-based system. This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement. We give a formal statement of the requirements, construct a model of the architecture’s ...

Operating System Security

Operating systems provide the fundamental mechanisms for securing computer processing. Since the 1960s, operating systems designers have explored how to build “secure” operating systems — operating systems whose mechanisms protect the system against a motivated adversary. Recently, the importance of ensuring such security has become a mainstream issue for all operating systems. In this book, we...

New approaches to operating system security extensibility

This dissertation proposes new approaches to commodity computer operating system (OS) access control extensibility that address historic problems with concurrency and technology transfer. Access control extensibility addresses a lack of consensus on operating system policy model at a time when security requirements are in flux: OS vendors, anti-virus companies, firewall manufacturers, smart pho...