POSE: Phase II: A Sustainable Open Source Consortium for the Tock Secure Embedded Operating System

被称为微控制器的微型计算机在我们的生活、技术和基础设施中无处不在。它们应用于传感器网络、可穿戴设备、汽车、建筑、智能电网和飞机。它们也是大型计算系统的一部分：微控制器是安全密钥、电话、笔记本电脑和数据中心服务器中计算机安全的基础。 虽然微控制器本身支撑着如此多的安全关键系统，但其自身的安全性是临时的和困难的，涉及劳动密集型工程和完全定制的软件。Tock是第一个为微控制器设计的安全、可靠、开源的操作系统。 Tock是以前NSF资助的研究的产物，它提供了在微控制器系统上快速构建和部署安全应用程序所需的构建块。今天，Tock开源项目是一个共享资源。大大小小的公司都在使用Tock为笔记本电脑、电话和服务器、身份验证设备以及汽车和其他嵌入式应用程序构建下一代安全信任根。 爱好者和研究人员使用Tock构建可穿戴设备和传感器网络。教育工作者使用Tock教授操作系统和嵌入式系统课程。该项目通过文档、开发人员工具、安全审计和教育资源以及建立对这些资源的管理，为Tock开源项目的持续发展奠定了基础。Tock是唯一能够利用现代静态类型编程语言和硬件隔离中的新颖技术，在低资源微控制器中提供隔离原语的公司。虽然这些机制不再是实验性的（例如，Rust，编写Tock的语言），但生态系统在这些特定用例的工具，文档，最佳实践和教育材料方面滞后。该项目为入门开发人员创建了Tock背景下的Rust和嵌入式系统的教育材料，正在开发和维护一个基于联合硬件的持续集成系统，以实现跨异构平台和设置的持续测试，并建立最好的-从广泛的开发人员上游贡献的做法，同时保持对操作的安全性和可靠性的高度信心，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Tiny computers called microcontrollers are ubiquitous throughout our lives, technology, and infrastructure. They are in sensor networks, wearables, cars, buildings, the smart grid, and airplanes. They are partof larger computing systems, too: microcontrollers are the foundation of computer security in security keys, phones, laptops, and datacenter servers. While microcontrollers themselves underpin so many security-critical systems, their own security is ad-hoc and difficult, involving labor-intensive engineering and completely custom software. Tock is the first secure, reliable, open-source operating system designed for microcontrollers. The product of previous NSF-funded research, Tock provides the building blocks necessary to quickly build and deploy secure applications on microcontroller systems. Today, the Tock open source project is a shared resource. Companies both small and large are using Tock to build next-generation secure roots-of-trust for laptops, phones and servers, authentication devices, and automotive and other embedded applications. Hobbyists and researchers build wearables and sensor networks using Tock. Educators use Tock to teach courses in operating systems and embedded systems. This project lays the foundation to sustain the Tock open source project through documentation, developer tools, security audits, and educational resources as well as establishing stewardship over these.Tock is uniquely able to provide isolation primitives in low-resource microcontrollers by leveraging novel techniques in modern, statically-typed programming languages and hardware isolation. While these mechanisms are no longer experimental (for example, Rust, the language in which Tock is written), the ecosystem lags on tools, documentation, best-practices, and educational materials for these particular use cases. This project creates educational materials for on-boarding developers to Rust and embedded systems in the context of Tock, is developing and maintaining a federated hardware-based continuous integration system to enable continuous testing across heterogeneous platforms and settings, and establishes best-practices for upstreaming contributions from a wide array of developers while maintaining a high degree of confidence in the security and reliability of the operating system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.