Poster: Rethinking Operating System Interfaces to Support Robust Applications

In current systems, application developers must provide substantial security-critical code—including code to handle authentication—in their applications. The result is that application flaws often undermine system security. We are building Ethos, an Operating System (OS) that leverages the kernel’s complete mediation property to guarantee more security protections—including network encryption and authentication—across all applications. Here we provide an overview of Ethos and a subset of its system call interface.