Linux.conf.au 2015 -- Auckland, New Zealand
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49:45 · 9.8K views · Jan 16, 2015
Gernot Heiser presents seL4, a microkernel with a mathematical proof connecting security properties to the binary code, and explains what its open-sourcing means for users. It covers its roles as a microkernel, separation kernel and hypervisor.
Cited to explain what formal verification of seL4 guarantees, such as ruling out whole classes of bugs like buffer overflows.
3 comments from Hacker News
> This is a great view on history of seL4. Is there a list of use cases where seL4 is being used outside academia? "Can you build actual systems with it?" this video The whole talk is well worth a watch.
Spent a while on the weekend reading about the seL4 kernel, which uses capability based security and has end to end mathematical proofs of correctness on the compiler and underlying kernel. Its predecessors are used in Apple's A7 and Qualcomm's chips. Watching this video and it says that it's mathematically impossible for seL4 to suffer from things such as buffer overflows. I'm faaaaaar out of my field here... but this sounds as like a far better improvement in security compared to running things in a chroot. Apart from it being really new (there's just a kernel with a C compiler), would this be a good route to head down for improving security? Why aren't we writing a linux port on this? Kernel info here: [LINK]
this video The implementation is correct against this abstract specification ... so bug-free, etc. The implications, there's many of them, but just a few obvious ones: it's not possible for this kernel to have a buffer overflow; it cannot - it provably does not use uninitialized variables or dereference null pointers, there's no stack smashing, you can't have code injection, there's no return oriented programming. Any of that stuff is just not possible - provably. So that's nice!