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Modern operating systems are monolithic. Today, however, lack of isolation is one of the main factors undermining security of the kernel. Inherent complexity of the kernel code and rapid development pace combined with the use of unsafe, low-level programming language results in a steady stream of errors. Even after decades of efforts to make commodity kernels more secure, i.e., development of numerous static and dynamic approaches aimed to prevent exploitation of most common errors, several hundreds of serious kernel vulnerabilities are reported every year. Unfortunately, in a monolithic kernel a single exploitable vulnerability potentially provides an attacker with access to the entire kernel.Modern kernels need isolation as a practical means of confining the effects of exploits to individual kernel subsystems. Historically, introducing isolation in the kernel is hard. First, commodity hardware interfaces provide no support for efficient, fine-grained isolation. Second, the complexity of a modern kernel prevents a naive decomposition effort. Our work on Lightweight Execution Domains (LXDs) takes a step towards enabling isolation in a full-featured operating system kernel. LXDs allow one to take an existing kernel subsystem and run it inside an isolated domain with minimal or no modifications and with a minimal overhead. We evaluate our approach by developing isolated versions of several performance-critical device drivers in the Linux kernel.
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RedLeaf: Isolation and Communication in a Safe Operating System
RedLeaf is a new operating system developed from scratch in Rust to explore the impact of language safety on operating system organization. In contrast to commodity systems, RedLeaf does not rely on hardware address spaces for isolation and instead uses only type and memory safety of the Rust language. Departure from costly hardware isolation mechanisms allows us to explore the design space of systems that embrace lightweight fine-grained isolation. We develop anew abstraction of a lightweight language-based isolation domain that provides a unit of information hiding and fault isolation. Domains can be dynamically loaded and cleanly terminated, i.e., errors in one domain do not affect the execution of other domains. Building on RedLeaf isolation mechanisms, we demonstrate the possibility to implement end-to-end zero-copy, fault isolation, and transparent recovery of device drivers. To evaluate the practicality of RedLeaf abstractions, we implement Rv6, a POSIX-subset operating system as a collection of RedLeaf domains. Finally, to demonstrate that Rust and fine-grained isolation are practical—we develop efficient versions of a 10Gbps Intel ixgbe network and NVMe solid-state disk device drivers that match the performance of the fastest DPDK and SPDK equivalents.
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- PAR ID:
- 10199456
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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