Foundational Concepts Immunix Foundational Concepts Specialization Immunix was preceded by the Synthetix project. Synthetix was concerned with using specialization to optimize OS performance. Guarding is the task of monitoring all of the terms of one's quasi-invariants so that you know when they change. We discovered that specialization could yield performance gains , but that it was hard work. We developed a specialization toolkit to ease the burden of specialization.
Specialization produces variant implementations.
Security exploits often depend on vulnerabilities in particular implementations. We are exploring whether variants produced via specialization can produce versions that are resistant to attack. Safety properties can be described in terms of invariants. We are exploring the potential of invariant enforcement to resist security attacks. The primary example of this is the StackGuard compiler, which enforces the invariant that return addresses should not change while a function is active, thus resisting stack smashing attacks.