Trustworthy Systems

Security is no excuse for poor performance: welcome to the world's most highly assured operating system

Authors

Gernot Heiser

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    UNSW,
    Sydney 2052, Australia

Published:

Invited Talk at the CyberUK Conference

Abstract

Major tech companies want to increase assurance across the whole stack, and are starting to take advantage of "provable security" and automated verification tools. In this session, we'll briefly explore what NCSC is doing to gain assurance for our most critical systems, before introducing the world's most highly assured operating system.

seL4 is the world's first operating system (OS) kernel with strong – mathematical – proofs of implementation correctness and security. We believe it's the OS with the most comprehensive assurance story, and at the same time the benchmark for performance. In this session we will provide an overview of what seL4 is and explain the meaning of its automated verification, and then discuss how seL4 can be used to protect security- and safety-critical systems.

BibTeX Entry

  @misc{Heiser_22:cyberuk,
    author           = {Gernot Heiser},
    howpublished     = {Invited Talk at the {CyberUK} Conference},
    location         = {Newport, UK},
    month            = may,
    title            = {Security is no excuse for poor performance: welcome to the world's most highly assured operating
                        system},
    year             = {2022}
  }

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