BOB 2018 - Alexander Senier: When one beyond-mainstream technology is not enough
Channel: BOB
Date: 2018-03-01

Alexander Senier
When one beyond-mainstream technology is not enough: Combining program verification with component-based architectures

Fuzzing. Bug bounties. ASLR. Code reviews. Despite the immense efforts put into improving the robustness of our software and the security of our systems, we don’t seem to make good progress here. Have a look at a recent update to your favorite smartphone OS. Every single month, dozens of flaws get fixed. But even more are still lurking in the code bases. Many of them allow for total system compromise. What is the reason that the situation does not seem to improve?

We argue that it’s the due to lacking approaches at the architecture level as well as the implementation level. Consequently, the problem has to be addressed at those two levels: Firstly, our systems need to be structured such that most complexity is in untrusted components which cannot affect system security. Secondly, for the much smaller trusted portions we need to establish formal correctness arguments.

In this talk, we present our approach to building trustworthy mobile OS. We combine the novel system architecture of the Genode OS framework with the SPARK technology for high-reliability applications.
Alexander Senier

Alexander Senier is the founder and CEO of Componolit, a startup developing a secure, open-source mobile OS that will run unmodified Android apps in isolation. Since he started programming 25 years ago, he is in search of tools and technologies for creating better software. Consequently, he’s interested in formal verification, microkernels and open-source software which he has used to build high-security systems in the past.

http://bobkonf.de/2018/senier.html