The operating system (OS) is the cornerstone for computer systems. It manages hardware and provides fundamental service for user-level applications. Thus, detecting bugs in OSes is important to improve the reliability of computer systems. Static typestate ...

Cross-domain applications are rapidly adopting blockchain techniques for immutability, availability, integrity, and interoperability. However, for most applications, global consensus is unnecessary and may not even provide sufficient guarantees.

We ...

Scaling Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) systems in terms of membership is important for secure applications with large participation such as blockchains. While traditional protocols have low latency, they cannot handle many processors. Conversely, ...

Multi-agent distributed systems are characterized by autonomous entities that interact with each other to provide, and/or request, different kinds of services. In several contexts, especially when a reward is offered according to the quality of service, ...

Unikernel specializes a minimalistic LibOS and a target application into a standalone single-purpose virtual machine (VM) running on a hypervisor, which is referred to as (virtual) appliance. Compared to traditional VMs, Unikernel appliances have ...

System-level Dynamic Binary Translation (DBT) provides the capability to boot an Operating System (OS) and execute programs compiled for an Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) different from that of the host machine. Due to their performance-critical ...

Users of modern data-processing services such as tax preparation or genomic screening are forced to trust them with data that the users wish to keep secret. Ryoan¹ protects secret data while it is processed by services that the data owner does not trust. ...

Today’s cloud computing infrastructure requires substantial trust. Cloud users rely on both the provider’s staff and its globally distributed software/hardware platform not to expose any of their private data.

We introduce the notion of shielded ...

This article studies undefined behavior arising in systems programming languages such as C/C++. Undefined behavior bugs lead to unpredictable and subtle systems behavior, and their effects can be further amplified by compiler optimizations. Undefined ...

Today’s smartphone operating systems frequently fail to provide users with visibility into how third-party applications collect and share their private data. We address these shortcomings with TaintDroid, an efficient, system-wide dynamic taint tracking ...

This article describes the historical context, technical challenges, and main implementation techniques used by VMware Workstation to bring virtualization to the x86 architecture in 1999. Although virtual machine monitors (VMMs) had been around for ...

Smartphones are increasingly ubiquitous, and many users carry multiple phones to accommodate work, personal, and geographic mobility needs. We present Cells, a virtualization architecture for enabling multiple virtual smartphones to run simultaneously ...

Proactive obfuscation is a new method for creating server replicas that are likely to have fewer shared vulnerabilities. It uses semantics-preserving code transformations to generate diverse executables, periodically restarting servers with these fresh ...

Worm containment must be automatic because worms can spread too fast for humans to respond. Recent work proposed network-level techniques to automate worm containment; these techniques have limitations because there is no information about the ...

Asbestos, a new operating system, provides novel labeling and isolation mechanisms that help contain the effects of exploitable software flaws. Applications can express a wide range of policies with Asbestos's kernel-enforced labels, including controls ...

TLS is the protocol of choice for securing today's e-commerce and online transactions but adding TLS to a Web server imposes a significant overhead relative to an insecure Web server on the same platform. We perform a comprehensive study of the ...

Cryptographic transformations are a fundamental building block in many security applications and protocols. To improve performance, several vendors market hardware accelerator cards. However, until now no operating system provided a mechanism that ...

Analyzing intrusions today is an arduous, largely manual task because system administrators lack the information and tools needed to understand easily the sequence of steps that occurred in an attack. The goal of BackTracker is to identify automatically ...

Software errors are a major cause of outages and they are increasingly exploited in malicious attacks. Byzantine fault tolerance allows replicated systems to mask some software errors but it is expensive to deploy. This paper describes a replication ...

Scalable management and self-organizational capabilities are emerging as central requirements for a generation of large-scale, highly dynamic, distributed applications. We have developed an entirely new distributed information management system called ...