Thesis Committee

Stephen Taylor, Ph.D. (Chair)

George Cybenko, Ph.D.

Sergey Bratus, Ph.D.

Steve Chapin, Ph.D.

Abstract

Developers and academics are constantly seeking to increase the speed and security of operating systems. Unfortunately, an increase in either one often comes at the cost of the other. This thesis will present an operating system design that challenges a long-held tenet of multicore operating systems in order to produce an alternative architecture that has the potential to deliver both increased security and faster performance. In particular, it proposes decoupling the operating system kernel from user processes by running each on completely separate processor cores instead of at different privilege levels within shared cores. Without using the hardware’s privilege modes, virtualization and virtual memory contexts enforce the security policies necessary to maintain process isolation and protection. The new kernel design paradigm offers the opportunity to simultaneously increase both performance and security; utilizing the hardware facilities for inter-core communication in place of those for privilege mode switching offers the opportunity for increased system call performance, while the hard separation between user processes and the kernel provides several strong security properties.