Hi Andrew,

your project looked interesting to me too so I decided to give it a look
and I coud read here:

https://gitlab.com/uxrt/core-supervisor/sel4-kernel

"The seL4 microkernel with patches for UX/RT"

But my question is: by modifying the seL4 kernel, don't you loose the
security of the formal verification? I mean, the nice thing of a formally
verified code is you can forget about it's security. Don't you fear you can
introduce vulnerabilities?

Cheers,

El sáb., 31 jul. 2021 3:53, Andrew Warkentin <[email protected]>
escribió:

> On 7/30/21, Sidhartha Agrawal <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hello sel4-devs,
> > I am a first-year graduate student at the University of British Columbia
> at
> > their Systopia Lab <https://systopia.cs.ubc.ca/> working on operating
> > systems research. My advisor is Prof. Margo Seltzer
> > <https://www.seltzer.com/margo>. In a past life, I have worked as a
> > software engineer at Oracle and Arista Networks. My research is on
> General
> > Purpose Isolation Mechanism in the OS. We ask whether we really need to
> > have N different isolation mechanisms or whether instead, we could
> develop
> > a framework in which all these different mechanisms represent points on a
> > continuum.  Here is a write-up <
> https://sid-agrawal.ca/#research-projects>
> > with
> > some more details. I am using seL4 as the microkernel base to build my
> > research idea. At this stage, I am not looking in to the formal
> > verification aspect of seL4, but that might change once I have a better
> > idea about the type of mechanism I want to build. I would also like to
> keep
> > the changes in the kernel to be minimum and try to demonstrate my ideas
> > using user space processes.
> >
> > I have tried out the tutorials on the seL4 website. Currently, I am
> > wading through the different helper libraries in seL4/seL4_libs
> > <https://github.com/seL4/seL4_libs>. As someone who is just starting
> with
> > seL4 ecosystem, I had a few high-level questions:
> >
> >    - Are there are example OSes built with seL4, which would be a good
> >    place to look at? Specifically, I am looking for components such as
> > basic
> >    versions of a process-server, vm-server, pager, file-systems server.
> >    - I came across refOS <https://github.com/seL4/refos>, but wasn't
> sure
> >       if it is still being maintained.
> >       - Another option was Genode
> >       <https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index>. This
> >       seemed to be maintained by another community and has many layers of
> >       abstractions since it supports multiple kernel backends.
> >
>
> I'm working on my own QNX-like OS based on seL4
> <https://gitlab.com/uxrt/>, although I haven't gotten very far and am
> still trying to finish up the memory allocators. UX/RT will have its
> own kind of general purpose isolation mechanism based around file
> security. It will be the first OS that I'm aware of under which
> everything truly is a file (even things like process heaps/stacks and
> the connection to the VFS itself will be files). Each process will
> have a list of files it is allowed to access (entries will apply to
> either a particular file or to all files in a particular directory).
> Since everything will be a file, basically all security will be
> reduced to file permissions, unlike in OSes with non-file-based
> primitives. On top of the file permissions there will be a daemon that
> implements a flexible form of role-based access control with
> user-definable roles. There will also be mechanisms to securely grant
> access to files, avoiding confused deputy vulnerabilities but only
> requiring relatively minor modifications to existing Unix applications
> rather than porting to a completely new system.
>
> There's also the Robigalia project <https://gitlab.com/robigalia/>,
> although they currently aren't as far along as I am (they abandoned
> their previous allocators, which I ended up forking, and are still
> only working on kernel bindings). Unlike what I am trying to do with
> UX/RT (write an OS that is superior to mainstream OSes while still
> being natively compatible with existing applications), they are
> wanting to build something completely new (with only limited
> sandbox-based backwards compatibility) based on persistent processes
> and a capability-oriented architecture.
>
> Otherwise, I'm not aware of any open seL4-based OSes besides the ones
> you mentioned. There are a few companies selling seL4-based embedded
> OSes but they are proprietary AFAIK.
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