Europe funds secure operating system research | Hacker News Reader

Europe funds secure operating system research

itworld.com

10 pointsluckystrike13 comments

Reminds me of this:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr...

The lily needed no gilding at all, and it certainly did not need to be nanofabricated from isotopically pure, individually selected gold atoms. Academic CS researchers at the time, for whatever ridiculous reason (probably something to do with microkernels), thought that there should be many more fine-grained security transitions in an OS environment. In fact if anything the trend is away from multiuser computing and toward virtualized or "shared-nothing" designs in which communication between protection domains is minimal.

Research needs to go into secure programming environments, not secure operating systems. The vast majority of horrible security flaws never come within a mile of the kernel.

The point of secure operating systems is not to reduce the number of flaws in the kernel. It is to make the authority gained by exploiting any single program minimal. So it should make flaws less horrible.

When I said "miles away from the kernel", I meant that the opportunity for the kernel to address problems in the application layer were minimal. There's little the kernel can to do, say, make SQL Injection less horrible.

Personally I consider the fact that a random downloaded game run, by default, could delete all your personal data a pretty big security flaw that can be dealt with at the kernel level.

So we have different meanings of security flaw. Probably because you are thinking of the security of a website, where I am more interested in securing the average users PC.

Read Dan Bernstein's retrospective on qmail, where he essentially disavows "least privilege" controls on his programs (which were the heart of his security model). Modern operating systems all offer some degree of privilege revocation and code-level access control; none of them get used, because users needs are too complex.

If a dent is really going to be made in this problem, it's going to happen in Flash Player (or its more recent analogs, like Google NaCL).

I'll grant you that current (and most proposed capability based) security systems are too complex for the user to manage.

However the question on the table is research. We should be researching security models that don't rely on the user to manage the complexity.

This title says that funding is for secure operating system research. Contents seems like its for making minix better. I am very skeptical about operating system that fixes its bugs. It may become one more multics project. Though micro kernel looks really good in theory, neither minix nor hurd have taken off like linux or FreeBSD

Anything new about exo-kernels?

They got renamed to hypervisors. One of my coworkers is still being funded by DOE to do libOSes for HPC.

Thanks.

Research needs to be done into better operating systems, but I don't think it is worth implementing too much of them.

Minix, from what I have read, isn't going to be a sufficient enough advance to get the man on the street to adopt it. For that to be true it would have to significantly easier to manage. While he advocates the principle of least authority, he isn't currently innovating on how that authority gets passed on to the programs. A lack of mechanism generally means it is up to the user to do so, which puts some work load and cognitive effort on the user.

So that's €2.5 million for 5 people for 5 years. Assuming they already own computers, that's €100,000/year each, and they don't even need to produce anything at the end of it. Nice work if you can get it!

Remind me again why we're a member of the EU?

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