Gernot Heiser

Gernot Heiser
UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Computer Science and Engineering

PhD

About

255
Publications
87,442
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11,443
Citations
Introduction
Gernot Heiser currently works at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW Sydney. Gernot does research in Operating Systems, with emphasis on Computer Security and Reliability, and Real-Time Systems. Most of his work is on or around the seL4 microkernel. Current focus is on Time Protection as a principled way of preventing information leakage through timing channels, and on scaling up software verification techniques to full operating systems. He is also involved in various transition and commercialisation activities.

Publications

Publications (255)
Preprint
Microarchitectural timing channels exploit information leakage between security domains that should be isolated, bypassing the operating system's security boundaries. These channels result from contention for shared microarchitectural state. In the RISC-V instruction set, the temporal fence instruction (fence.t) was proposed to close timing channel...
Chapter
Microarchitectural timing channels are a well-known mechanism for information leakage. Time protection has recently been demonstrated as an operating-system mechanism able to prevent them. However, established theories of information-flow security are insufficient for verifying time protection, which must distinguish between (legal) overt and (ille...
Preprint
Microarchitectural timing channels enable unwanted information flow across security boundaries, violating fundamental security assumptions. They leverage timing variations of several state-holding microarchitectural components and have been demonstrated across instruction set architectures and hardware implementations. Analogously to memory protect...
Article
Microarchitectural timing channels enable unwanted information flow across security boundaries, violating fundamental security assumptions. They leverage timing variations of several state-holding microarchitectural components and have been demonstrated across instruction set architectures and hardware implementations. Analogously to memory protect...
Article
We describe our ongoing research that aims to eliminate microarchitectural timing channels through time protection, which eliminates the root cause of these channels, competition for capacity-limited hardware resources. A proof-ofconcept implementation of time protection demonstrated the approach can be effective a nd l ow o verhead, b ut also that...
Preprint
Covert channels enable information leakage across security boundaries of the operating system. Microarchitectural covert channels exploit changes in execution timing resulting from competing access to limited hardware resources. We use the recent experimental support for time protection, aimed at preventing covert channels, in the seL4 microkernel...
Conference Paper
Timing channels are a significant and growing security threat in computer systems, with no established solution. We have recently argued that the OS must provide time protection, in analogy to the established memory protection, to protect applications from information leakage through timing channels. Based on a recently-proposed implementation of t...
Conference Paper
Timing channels enable data leakage that threatens the security of computer systems, from cloud platforms to smartphones and browsers executing untrusted third-party code. Preventing unauthorised information flow is a core duty of the operating system, however, present OSes are unable to prevent timing channels. We argue that OSes must provide time...
Preprint
Timing channels are a significant and growing security threat in computer systems, with no established solution. We have recently argued that the OS must provide time protection, in analogy to the established memory protection, to protect applications from information leakage through timing channels. Based on a recently-proposed implementation of t...
Article
Current approaches to cyberresiliency rely on patching systems after a vulnerability is discovered. What is needed is a clean-slate, mathematically based approach for building secure software. We developed new tools based on formal methods for building software for unmanned air vehicles that is provably secure against cyberattacks.
Preprint
Full-text available
Timing channels enable data leakage that threatens the security of computer systems, from cloud platforms to smartphones and browsers executing untrusted third-party code. Preventing unauthorised information flow is a core duty of the operating system, however, present OSes are unable to prevent timing channels. We argue that OSes must provide time...
Article
Verified software secures the Unmanned Little Bird autonomous helicopter against mid-flight cyber attacks.
Conference Paper
The security benefits of keeping a system's trusted computing base (TCB) small has long been accepted as a truism, as has the use of internal protection boundaries for limiting the damage caused by exploits. Applied to the operating system, this argues for a small microkernel as the core of the TCB, with OS services separated into mutually-protecte...
Conference Paper
The recent Spectre exploits demonstrated that covert timing channels are a mainstream security threat. Their prevention requires that operating systems provide time protection, in addition to the established memory protection. We propose OS mechanisms and designs which provide time protection, and define requirements on the hardware to enable them....
Conference Paper
Mixed-criticality systems (MCS) combine real-time components of different levels of criticality - i.e. severity of failure - on the same processor, in order to obtain good resource utilisation. They must be able to guarantee deadlines of highly-critical threads without any dependence on less-critical threads. This requires strong temporal isolation...
Article
Full-text available
Microarchitectural timing channels expose hidden hardware states though timing. We survey recent attacks that exploit microarchitectural features in shared hardware, especially as they are relevant for cloud computing. We classify types of attacks according to a taxonomy of the shared resources leveraged for such attacks. Moreover, we take a detail...
Conference Paper
Property-based testing can play an important role in reducing the cost of formal verification: It has been demonstrated to be effective at detecting bugs and finding inconsistencies in specifications, and thus can eliminate effort wasted on fruitless proof attempts. We argue that in addition, property-based testing enables an incremental approach t...
Conference Paper
In the paper, we argue that it is worthwhile to revisit building microkernel-based multiserver operating systems, and introduce a multiserver OS architecture. We argue that recent formal verification of microkernels provides a compelling platform for constructing general purpose systems, and that existing systems are not appropriate to take advanta...
Article
Full-text available
Worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis of real-time code needs to be performed on the executable binary code for soundness. Obtaining tight WCET bounds requires determination of loop bounds and elimination of infeasible paths. The binary code, however, lacks information necessary to determine these bounds. This information is usually provided th...
Article
Full-text available
We investigate how different categories of microarchitectural state on recent ARM and x86 processors can be used for covert timing channels and how effective architecture-provided mechanisms are in closing them. We find that in recent Intel processors there is no effective way for sanitising the state of the branch prediction unit and that, contrar...
Article
The trade-off between coarse- and fine-grained locking is a well understood issue in operating systems. Coarse-grained locking provides lower overhead under low contention, fine-grained locking provides higher scalability under contention, though at the expense of implementation complexity and re- duced best-case performance. We revisit this trade-...
Article
Discusses the current state of the journal, reports on current and future areas of exploration and research, and presents new editors.
Article
Full-text available
Mixed-criticality systems combine real-time components of different levels of criticality, i.e. severity of failure, on the same processor, in order to obtain good resource utilisation. They must guarantee deadlines of highly-critical tasks at the expense of lower-criticality ones in the case of overload. Present operating systems provide inadequat...
Article
The L4 microkernel has undergone 20 years of use and evolution. It has an active user and developer community, and there are commercial versions that are deployed on a large scale and in safety-critical systems. In this article we examine the lessons learnt in those 20 years about microkernel design and implementation. We revisit the L4 design arti...
Article
We present an approach to writing and formally verifying high-assurance file-system code in a restricted language called Cogent, supported by a certifying compiler that produces C code, high-level specification of Cogent, and translation correctness proofs. The language is strongly typed and guarantees absence of a number of common file system impl...
Article
We present an approach to writing and formally verifying high-assurance file-system code in a restricted language called Cogent, supported by a certifying compiler that produces C code, high-level specification of Cogent, and translation correctness proofs. The language is strongly typed and guarantees absence of a number of common file system impl...
Article
We present an approach to writing and formally verifying high-assurance file-system code in a restricted language called Cogent, supported by a certifying compiler that produces C code, high-level specification of Cogent, and translation correctness proofs. The language is strongly typed and guarantees absence of a number of common file system impl...
Conference Paper
We present an approach to writing and formally verifying high-assurance file-system code in a restricted language called Cogent, supported by a certifying compiler that produces C code, high-level specification of Cogent, and translation correctness proofs. The language is strongly typed and guarantees absence of a number of common file system impl...
Conference Paper
Cache side channel attacks are serious threats to multi-tenant public cloud platforms. Past work showed how secret information in one virtual machine (VM) can be extracted by another co-resident VM using such attacks. Recent research demonstrated the feasibility of high-bandwidth, low-noise side channel attacks on the last-level cache (LLC), which...
Conference Paper
It is well-established that high-end scalability requires fine-grained locking, and for a system like Linux, a big lock degrades performance even at moderate core counts. Nevertheless, we argue that a big lock may be fine-grained enough for a microkernel designed to run on closely-coupled cores (sharing a cache), as with the short system calls typi...
Article
We present an effective implementation of the Prime Probe side-channel attack against the last-level cache. We measure the capacity of the covert channel the attack creates and demonstrate a cross-core, cross-VM attack on multiple versions of GnuPG. Our technique achieves a high attack resolution without relying on weaknesses in the OS or virtual m...
Technical Report
Full-text available
Modern Intel processors use an undisclosed hash function to map memory lines into last-level cache slices. In this work we develop a technique for reverse-engineering the hash function. We apply the technique to a 6-core Intel processor and demonstrate that knowledge of this hash function can facilitate cache-based side channel attacks, reducing th...
Article
Storage channels can be provably eliminated in well-designed, highassurance kernels. Timing channels remain the last mile for confidentiality and are still beyond the reach of formal analysis, so must be dealt with empirically. We perform such an analysis, collecting a large data set (2,000 hours of observations) for two representative timing chann...
Article
Static analysis techniques can be used to compute safe bounds on the worst-case execution time (WCET) of programs. For large programs, abstractions are often required to curb computational complexity. These abstractions may introduce infeasible paths which result in significant overestimation. These paths can be eliminated by adding additional cons...
Article
File systems are too important, and current ones are too buggy, to remain unverified. Yet the most successful verification methods for functional correctness remain too expensive for current file system implementations-we need verified correctness but at reasonable cost. This paper presents our vision and ongoing work to achieve this goal for a new...
Article
Full-text available
We present an in-depth coverage of the comprehensive machine-checked formal verification of seL4, a general-purpose operating system microkernel. We discuss the kernel design we used to make its verification tractable. We then describe the functional correctness proof of the kernel's C implementation and we cover further steps that transform this r...
Article
Formal program verification offers strong assurance of correctness, backed by the strength of mathematical proof. Constructing these proofs requires humans to identify program invariants, and show that they are always maintained. These invariants are then used to prove that the code adheres to its specification. In this paper, we explore the overla...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The L4 microkernel has undergone 20 years of use and evolution. It has an active user and developer community, and there are commercial versions which are deployed on a large scale and in safety-critical systems. In this paper we examine the lessons learnt in those 20 years about microkernel design and implementation. We revisit the L4 design paper...
Conference Paper
Energy management is a primary consideration in the design of modern smartphones, made more interesting by the recent proliferation of multi-core processors in this space. We investigate how core offlining and DVFS can be used together on these systems to reduce energy consumption. We show that core offlining leads to very modest savings in the bes...
Article
Full-text available
File systems are too important, and current ones are too buggy, to remain unverified. Yet the most successful verification methods for functional correctness remain too expensive for current file system implementations --- we need verified correctness but at reasonable cost. This paper presents our vision and ongoing work to achieve this goal for a...
Conference Paper
Formal program verification offers strong assurance of correctness, backed by the strength of mathematical proof. Constructing these proofs requires humans to identify program invariants, and show that they are always maintained. These invariants are then used to prove that the code adheres to its specification. In this paper, we explore the overla...
Conference Paper
Modern smartphones are increasingly performant and feature-rich but remain highly power-constrained. Effective energy management demands an informed policy, and to that end we present a detailed power analysis of the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone. We measure power consumption by instrumentation at the circuit level, and present a breakdown by the...
Conference Paper
Modern implementations of DBMS software are intended to take advantage of high core counts that are becoming common in high-end servers. However, we have observed that several database platforms, including MySQL, Shore-MT, and a commercial system, exhibit throughput collapse as load increases into oversaturation (where there are more request thread...
Conference Paper
The processor industry has reached the point where sequential improvements have plateaued and we are being flooded with parallel hardware we don't know how to utilise. An efficient, general-purpose and easy-touse parallel model is urgently needed to replace the von Neumann model. We introduce and discuss the selfmodifying dataflow graph, an unusual...
Conference Paper
Database management systems provide updates with guaranteed durability in the presence of OS crashes or power failures. Durability is achieved by performing synchronous writes to a transaction log on stable, non-volatile storage. The procedure is expensive and several techniques have been devised to ameliorate the impact on overall performance at t...
Conference Paper
Multi-criticality real-time systems require protected-mode operating systems with bounded interrupt latencies and guaranteed isolation between components. A tight WCET analysis of such systems requires trustworthy information about loop bounds and infeasible paths. We propose sequoll, a framework for employing model checking of binary code to deter...
Conference Paper
The market of embedded processors far surpasses the market of personal computers and servers. While being more prolific than their desktop counterparts, the progress in semiconductor technology has also brought unprecedented computing power to embedded systems. On the back of these opportunities the complexity of embedded applications is rising dra...
Article
Real-time operating systems (RTOSes) are traditionally designed to be fully preemptible. This improves the average interrupt response time of the system but increases kernel complexity. An alternative design is to make the kernel mostly non-preemptible and only handle pending interrupts at specific pre-emption points within the kernel. While this p...
Article
Full-text available
The common-case IPC handler in microkernels, referred to as the fastpath, is performance-critical and thus is often optimised using hand-written assembly. However, compiler technology has advanced significantly in the past decade, which suggests that we should re-evaluate this approach. We present a case study of optimising the IPC fast-path in the...
Article
Full-text available
Many real-time operating systems (RTOSes) offer very small interrupt latencies, in the order of tens or hundreds of cycles. They achieve this by making the RTOS kernel fully preemptible, permitting interrupts at almost any point in execution except for some small critical sections. One drawback of this approach is that it is difficult to reason abo...
Article
Full-text available
The time has arrived for truly trustworthy systems, backed by machine-checked proofs of security and reliability. Research demonstrates that formal whole-system analysis that applies to the C and binary implementation level is feasible, including proofs of integrity, authority confinement, confidentiality, and worst-case execution time. Because the...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Operating systems offering virtual memory and protected address spaces have been an elusive target of static worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis. This is due to a combination of size, unstructured code and tight coupling with hardware. As a result, hard real-time systems are usually developed without memory protection, perhaps utilizing a lig...
Conference Paper
Mobile platforms are becoming as powerful as PCs were not too long ago. The complexity of their software stacks also starts rivalling those of PCs, and increasingly they run operating systems which originated in the desktop world. It should therefore not be too surprising that another phenomenon familiar from the server and desktop world, virtualiz...
Article
Full-text available
ARM is the dominant processor architecture for mobile devices and many other high-end embedded systems. Late last year ARM announced architectural support for virtualization, which will allow execution of unmodified guest operating system binaries. We have designed and im-plemented what we believe is the first hypervisor supporting pure virtu-aliza...
Article
Full-text available
Hard real-time systems are typically written to execute either on bare metal or on a small real-time executive that offers no memory protection. This model scales poorly as systems become more complex and integrated, as is the trend in industry today. Designing hard real-time systems on a protected OS is often avoided due to the difficulty in predi...
Article
We argue that the device driver architecture enforced by current operating systems complicates both manual and automatic reasoning about driver behaviour. In particular, it makes it hard and in some cases impossible to statically verify that the driver correctly interacts with the rest of the kernel. This limitation cannot be addressed solely via b...
Conference Paper
Platform virtualization, which supports the co-existence of multiple operating-system environments on a single physical platform, is now commonplace in server computing, as it can provide similar isolation as separate physical servers, but with improved resource utilisation. In the embedded space, virtualization is a new development, which is likel...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Faulty device drivers are a major source of operating system failures. We argue that the underlying cause of many driver faults is the separation of two highly-related tasks: device verification and driver development. These two tasks have a lot in common, and result in software that is conceptually and functionally similar, yet kept totally separa...
Article
Faulty device drivers are a major source of operating system failures. We argue that the underlying cause of many driver faults is the separation of two highly-related tasks: device verification and driver development. These two tasks have a lot in common, and result in software that is conceptually and functionally similar, yet kept totally separa...
Article
Full-text available
We describe Currawong, a tool to perform system software architecture optimisation. Currawong is an extensible tool which applies optimisations at the point where an applica- tion invokes framework or library code. Currawong does not require source code to perform optimisations, eectively decoupling the relationship between compilation and optimi-...
Article
Full-text available
Energy consumption has become a major concern for all computing systems, from servers in data-centres to mobile phones. Processor manufacturers have reacted to this by implementing power-management mechanisms in the hardware and researchers have investigated how op-erating systems can make use of those mechanisms to minimise energy consumption. Muc...
Article
Full-text available
The advent of formally verified OS kernels means that for the first time we have a truly trustworthy foundation for systems. In this paper we explore the design space this opens up. The obvious applications are in security, although not all of them are quite as obvious, for example as they relate to TPMs. We further find that the kernel's dependabi...
Article
Full-text available
Computer systems are routinely deployed in life- and mission-critical situations, yet their security, safety or dependability can in most cases not be assured to the degree warranted by the application. In other words, trusted computer systems are rarely really trustworthy. We believe that this is highly unsatisfactory, and have embarked on a large...
Article
Full-text available
Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a commonly-used power-management technique where the clock frequency of a processor is decreased to allow a corresponding reduction in the supply voltage. This re-duces power consumption, which can lead to significant reduction in the energy required for a computation, par-ticularly for memory-bound w...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We revisit the device-driver architecture supported by the majority of operating systems, where a driver is a passive object that does not have its own thread of control and is only activated when an external thread invokes one of its entry points. This architecture complicates driver development and induces errors in two ways. First, since multipl...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Mobile consumer-electronics devices, especially phones, are powered from batteries which are limited in size and therefore capacity. This implies that managing energy well is paramount in such devices. Good energy management requires a good understanding of where and how the energy is used. To this end we present a detailed analysis of the power co...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We argue that recent hypervisor-vs-microkernel discussions com- pletely miss the point. Fundamentally, the two classes of systems have much in common, and provide similar abstractions. We assert that the requirements for both types of systems can be met with a single set of abstractions, a single design, and a single implementa- tion. We present pa...
Article
Full-text available
We report on the formal, machine-checked verication of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specication down to its C implementation. We assume correctness of compiler, assembly code, hardware, and boot code. seL4 is a third-generation microkernel of L4 provenance, comprising 8,700 lines of C and 600 lines of assembler. Its performance is comparab...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
We describe Currawong, a tool to perform system software architecture optimisation. Currawong is an extensible tool which applies optimisations at the point where an application invokes framework or library code. Currawong does not require source code to perform optimisations, effectively decoupling the relationship between compilation and optimisa...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Faulty device drivers cause significant damage through down time and data loss. The problem can be mitigated by an improved driver development process that guar- antees correctness by construction. We achieve this by synthesising drivers automatically from formal specifi- cations of device interfaces, thus reducing the impact of human error on driv...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Complete formal verification is the only known way to guarantee that a system is free of programming errors. We present our experience in performing the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness of compiler, assembly code, and hardware, and we used...
Article
vNUMA, for virtual NUMA, is a virtual machine that presents a cluster as a virtual shared-memory multiprocessor. It is designed to make the computational power of clusters available to legacy applications and operating systems. A characteristic aspect of vNUMA is that it incorporates distributed shared memory (DSM) inside the hypervisor, in contras...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Managing the power consumption of computing platforms is a complicated problem thanks to a multitude of hardware configuration options and characteristics. Much of the academic research is based on unrealistic assumptions, and has, therefore, seen little practical uptake. We provide an overview of the difficulties facing power management schemes wh...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Device drivers are notorious for being a major source of failure in operating systems. In analysing a sample of real defects in Linux drivers, we found that a large propor- tion (39%) of bugs are due to two key shortcomings in the device-driver architecture enforced by current operat ing systems: poorly-defined communication protocols between drive...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Virtualization, well established in enterprise computing, is finding its way into embedded systems. However, the use cases differ dramatically between the domains, and this results in significant differences in the requirements on the virtual-machine technology. This paper examines a number of typical virtualization use cases from the CE domain, an...
Chapter
Full-text available
Trusted computing is important, but we argue that it remains an illusion as long as the underlying trusted computing base (TCB) is not trustworthy. We observe that present approaches to trusted computing do not really address this issue, but are trusting TCBs which have not been shown to deserve this trust. We argue that only mathematical proof can...
Article
Full-text available
We make the case for virtual shared memory (VSM) for supporting future many-core chips. VSM is a shared memory abstraction im-plemented over distributed memory by a hypervisor, providing the operating system direct access to all memory in the system. VSM on a distributed-memory system, such as a many-core chip with lo-cal memory associated with eac...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Despite its current popularity, para-virtualization has an enormous cost. Its deviation from the platform architecture abandons many of the benefits of traditional virtualization: stable and well-defined platform interfaces, hypervisor neutrality, operating system neutrality, and upgrade neutrality - in sum, modularity. Additionally, para-virtualiz...