On 11/18/20 10:44 PM, Gernot Heiser wrote:
> Dear seL4 Community,
> 
> Those who attended today’s closing session at the seL4 Summit have heard 
> about this, for the rest I’m pleased to announce that we have an RFC out for 
> the seL4 Core Platform, a minimal seL4-based OS for 
> embedded/cyberphysical/IoT applications, see 
> https://sel4.atlassian.net/browse/RFC-5
> 
> Feedback welcome.
> 
> Gernot

I hope it is okay for me to respond here, as opposed to on JIRA, but
if you prefer the latter, just let me know and I will comment there.

The design document appears to be well-written, and gives a good
explanation of what the seL4 Core Platform is.  That said, there are
two ways I believe it could be improved.

The first is an explanation for why the restrictions stated are
acceptable.  For instance, it is clear that the targeted systems are
static.  Why is dynamism not required?  Is it because these systems
are created with a single purpose in mind, and so do not need the
level of extensibility that a dynamic system offers?

The second is the ability to forcibly reset a protection domain to
its initial state.  For instance, a printer might have a PostScript
interpreter and a PDF rasterizer.  Both of these have been major
sources of vulnerabilities in the past, and are of such complexity
that reimplementation may not be viable.  Instead, the untrusted
rendering code can run in its own protection domain.  After a print
job has been processed, the renderer is forcibly reset, preventing
any attack from harming other jobs.  This feature can also be used
to recover from a crash of an individual component, without having
to reboot the entire system.

Sincerely,

Demi

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