{"id":182960,"date":"2007-05-22T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-31T10:11:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/secure-virtual-architecture-a-novel-foundation-for-operating-system-security\/"},"modified":"2016-09-09T09:43:40","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T16:43:40","slug":"secure-virtual-architecture-a-novel-foundation-for-operating-system-security","status":"publish","type":"msr-video","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/video\/secure-virtual-architecture-a-novel-foundation-for-operating-system-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Secure Virtual Architecture: A Novel Foundation for Operating System Security"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This talk describes Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA), an efficient and robust approach to provide a safe execution environment for an entire commodity operating system, such as Linux and its hosted applications. SVA defines a simple, but complete, virtual architecture, implemented via a compiler-based virtual machine. The SVA approach is efficient and requires relatively few changes to the guest OS because it is based on a set of novel, and highly efficient, techniques to enforce strong safety properties for *unmodified* C programs. We have ported the Linux kernel to SVA with only minimal changes to the machine-independent part of the kernel. The safety guarantees in SVA are close to, but slightly weaker than, those provided by a safe language like Java, C#, or Modula-3; these compromises are key to both efficiency and minimal porting changes. The approach is robust because both SVA and the virtual machine are designed to remove the complex, safety-checking compiler from the trusted computing base, and requiring only a simple type checker to be trusted. The SVA design also enables similarly robust implementation of higher-level security properties that can be represented as type systems.<\/p>\n

The safe execution environment enforced by SVA can provide three benefits for operating system designers and users. First, it can eliminate a large class of vulnerabilities that are by far the most common targets of exploits today. Second, a safe execution environment can foster new avenues for innovation in commodity systems, by incorporating techniques developed in research kernels using safe languages, such as extensibility, type-safe communication, and others. Third, many higher-level security problems could be addressed effectively by a combination of compiler and run-time techniques enabled by a compiler-based virtual machine. The long-term goal of the SVA project is to develop new solutions to higher-level security problems in current systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This talk describes Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA), an efficient and robust approach to provide a safe execution environment for an entire commodity operating system, such as Linux and its hosted applications. SVA defines a simple, but complete, virtual architecture, implemented via a compiler-based virtual machine. The SVA approach is efficient and requires relatively few changes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":194829,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[],"msr-video-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-session-type":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"msr-episode":[],"msr-research-theme":[],"class_list":["post-182960","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/3qG5eTf-fnA","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/182960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/182960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/194829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-session-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-session-type?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-episode","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-episode?post=182960"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-theme?post=182960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}