CT-ISG: Collaborative Research: Non-bypassable Kernel Services for Execution Security

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Society is dependent on many engineered systems whose increasingcomplexity and inter-connectedness have, in turn, increased theirvulnerability to adversarial attacks. In many of these systems,protecting the execution of their computations is as crucial asensuring the security of their data. This research investigates howto maintain survivable operation of such systems, even in the face ofinvasive attacks where computations are intentionally subverted tointerfere with other computations' execution constraints.The goal of this research is to develop new techniques for isolatingthe effects of interactions among computations through specificresources in these systems, including: flexible specification andrigorous enforcement of computations' execution constraints; explicitcontrol of all OS kernel components under a single scheduler; detailedon-line monitoring of computations and their supporting OS kernelcomponents; automated learning to discover previously unknowninteractions among computations; and formal modeling and verificationof computations, execution constraints, and system components andresources.The expected benefits of this project include: a novel approach tonon-bypassable isolation of computations from the effects ofadversarial attack in which isolation can be enforced flexiblyaccording to the system-specific execution constraints that must besatisfied; a high quality open-source software implementation ofkernel-level scheduling and monitoring services that provide andmeasure such non-bypassable isolation; new formal models, analyses,and methodologies for verifiably correct configuration and managementof those services; and empirical studies of the services' ability toprotect computations from interference under a wide range ofadversarial attacks.