[Nets-seminars] Andrea Bittau's Talk, June 15th, 4pm

[Petr Marchenko]

I am sorry for the short notice. Andrea Bittau,  a postdoc at Stanford
and a PhD graduate from UCL, will give a talk on his latest research
work which has been submitted to Symposium on Operating Systems
Principles (SOSP).

Date: Today (Friday, 15 June)
Time: 4pm
Location:  MPEB 6.12

Title: Dune: Safe User-level Access to Privileged CPU Features

Abstract:

Dune is a system that provides applications with direct but
safe access to hardware features such as ring protection, page
tables, and tagged TLBs, while preserving the existing OS interfaces
for processes.  Dune uses the virtualization hardware in modern
processors to provide a process, rather than a machine abstraction.
It consists of a small kernel module that initializes virtualization
hardware and mediates interactions with the kernel, and a minimal
user-level library that assists applications with managing
privileged hardware features. We present the implementation of Dune
for 64-bit x86 Linux. We use Dune to implement, at
user-level, four applications that can benefit from access to
privileged hardware: a sandbox for untrusted code, a privilege
separation facility, a garbage collector, and a process
checkpointing system. The use of Dune greatly simplifies the
implementation of these applications and provides significant
performance advantages.

Bio:

Andrea is a postdoc at Stanford working on secure systems.  He did his
PhD at UCL on primitives for privilege separation.