Systems Seminar: Emin Gün Sirer, Cornell University

Trustworthy Computing with the Nexus Operating System

Abstract

Tamper-proof coprocessors for secure computing are poised to become a standard hardware feature on future computers. Such hardware provides the primitives necessary to support trustworthy computing applications, that is, applications that can provide strong guarantees about their run time behavior. Current operating systems, however, lack the architecture and abstractions required to support trustworthy computing.

In this talk, I will outline a new operating system, called the Nexus, my group is building to support trustworthy computing applications. The Nexus has three unique properties: a novel architecture to reduce the trusted computing base, a general-purpose and flexible attestation mechanism to establish statements about the current state of a computation, and a strong, high-performance isolation mechanism to enable reasoning about future behavior based on statements about the present. This talk will describe the new abstractions and mechanisms we developed to support trustworthy computing, illustrate their use with several applications we have built, and point to new research directions enabled by a trustworthy operating system.

Speaker Bio

Gun Sirer is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. He works on self-organizing systems, which span operating systems, networking and distributed systems. Much of his research emphasizes building systems based on principled reasons for their correct functioning. His current projects involve peer-to-peer systems, systems support for ad hoc networks, and operating systems.