My OperaEthos - Operating system to battle botnets
Sunday, April 25, 2010 7:41:33 AM
INTRO : The applications that run on a system are more prone to bugs and viruses than the OS itself. One way to handle security of our systems is to have third-party softwares which provide the necessary security from spams, viruses and hacking. Another way is to handle security issues at the OS level. Ethos OS is a step in this regard.
The purpose of this OS is to to pioneer a new secure system call interface with clean semantics that helps to reduce/eliminate programmer induced bugs/security holes in system software. Soloworth[Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois] along with Daniel Bernstein[Research Professor of Computer Science] are in the process of developing this OS. Bernstein's role is to expose vulnerabilities that need fixing. Also, his expertise in cryptography and networking will be useful.
The purpose of this OS is to to pioneer a new secure system call interface with clean semantics that helps to reduce/eliminate programmer induced bugs/security holes in system software. Soloworth[Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois] along with Daniel Bernstein[Research Professor of Computer Science] are in the process of developing this OS. Bernstein's role is to expose vulnerabilities that need fixing. Also, his expertise in cryptography and networking will be useful.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------FULL ARTICLE : The applications that run on a system are more prone to bugs and viruses than the OS itself. One way to handle security of our systems is to have third-party softwares which provide the necessary security from spams, viruses and hacking. Another way is to handle security issues at the OS level. Ethos OS is a step in this regard.
The purpose of this OS is to to pioneer a new secure system call interface with clean semantics that helps to reduce/eliminate programmer induced bugs/security holes in system software. Soloworth[Associate Professor of Computer Science at University of Illinois] along with Daniel Bernstein[Research Professor of Computer Science] are in the process of developing this OS. Bernstein's role is to expose vulnerabilities that need fixing. Also, his expertise in cryptography and networking will be useful.
The OS is going to run on virtual machine monitor, also called a hypervisor, which is not going to follow the POSIX standard. Specifically, the OS is going to run on Xen hypervisor. The OS is going to make use of the Hypercall interface provided by the Xen hypervisor to execute previleged instructions.
At present the focus in developing the OS is on developing a basic kernel which supports processes, pre-emptive scheduling and a system call-interface to be able to evaluate the new secure system calls. The work related to file system, networking and device drivers will be delegated to a Linux kernel. To make it work, Soloworth has come up with a paired OS design which looks like this :
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| Ethos <--|--> Linux |
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| XEN |
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This project is also funded by National Science Foundation.
Some useful links :
1. Ethos - An Operating system for the Xen hypervisor.
2. Ethos: an operating system which creates a culture of security.
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