By nickolai Zeldovich, Silas Boyd-Wickizer, eddie Kohler, and David Mazières abstract HiStar is a new operating system designed to minimize the amount of code that must be trusted. HiStar provides strict information flow control, which allows users to specify precise data security policies without unduly limiting the structure of applications. HiStar's security features make it possible to implement a Unix-like environment with acceptable performance almost entirely in an untrusted user-level library. The system has no notion of superuser and no fully trusted code other than the kernel. HiStar's features permit several novel applications, including privacy-preserving, untrusted virus scanners and a dynamic Web server with only a few thousand lines of trusted code.
The HiStar REF operating system, on which Cinder is based, is designed from the ground up to minimize the amount of code that must be trusted.
Making information flow explicit in HiStar
CACM
Computer Science