Vikram Adve, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Title: Secure Virtual Architecture: A Novel Foundation for
       Operating System Security

Abstract:

This talk describes Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA), an efficient
and robust approach to provide a safe execution environment for an
entire commodity operating system, such as Linux and its hosted
applications.  SVA defines a simple, but complete, virtual
architecture, implemented via a compiler-based virtual machine.  The
SVA approach is efficient and requires relatively few changes to the
guest OS because it is based on a set of novel, and highly efficient,
techniques to enforce strong safety properties for *unmodified* C
programs.  We have ported the Linux kernel to SVA with only minimal
changes to the machine-independent part of the kernel.  The safety
guarantees in SVA are close to, but slightly weaker than, those
provided by a safe language like Java, C\#, or Modula-3; these
compromises are key to both efficiency and minimal porting changes.
The approach is robust because both SVA and the virtual machine are
designed to remove the complex, safety-checking compiler from the
trusted computing base, and requiring only a simple type checker to be
trusted.  The SVA design also enables similarly robust implementation
of higher-level security properties that can be represented as type
systems.

The safe execution environment enforced by SVA can provide three
benefits for operating system designers and users.  First, it can
eliminate a large class of vulnerabilities that are by far the most
common targets of exploits today.  Second, a safe execution
environment can foster new avenues for innovation in commodity
systems, by incorporating techniques developed in research kernels
using safe languages, such as extensibility, type-safe communication,
and others.  Third, many higher-level security problems could be
addressed effectively by a combination of compiler and run-time
techniques enabled by a compiler-based virtual machine.  The long-term
goal of the SVA project is to develop new solutions to higher-level
security problems in current systems.


Bio:

Vikram Adve is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  His research interests
include compilers, security, computer architecture, and performance
evaluation.  His research group has developed the LLVM Compiler
Infrastructure, a widely distributed and novel compiler framework for
'lifelong' optimization of programs.  LLVM is in production use by
several companies including Apple, Cray, Ageia, and others.  A broad
ongoing project in Adve's group is Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA),
a compiler-based virtual-machine for operating system kernels that can
be used to enhance system security and reliability.  Adve received a
B.Tech. from I.I.T. Bombay in 1987, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from
the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993, and was a Research
Scientist at Rice University before joining the University of
Illinois.  He has received the NSF CAREER award, Best Paper Awards at
PLDI 2005 and PADS 2001, and the UIUC Computer Science Department's
Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.  He is an Associate Editor of the
ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS).