High Confidence Operating Systems

Operating System development is difficult; debugging OSs is a daunting challenge, especially considering the hostile kernel environment and the amount of concurrency that takes place. A stable OS is crucial, especially in light of today's attackers who are looking for any way to exploit bugs to gain unauthorized access. In this project we apply formal verification techniques, using Concurrent Class Machines (CCMs) to verify that kernel code confirms to system call specifications. We verify that no sequence of system calls, with any input, could potentially leave the OS in an inconsistent state or crash the OS. We explore static techniques at compile time, dynamic techniques at run time, slicing as a way to focus on specific aspects of the kernel code (e.g., locking semantics, reference counting consistency, etc.).

See also the overall HCOS project Web page.

Journal Articles:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Software Monitoring with Controllable Overhead BibTeX International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) Dec 2010 invited submission, under review

Conference and Workshop Papers:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Aspect-Oriented Instrumentation with GCC BibTeX 1st International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV 2010) Nov 2010 to appear
2 The Visual Development of GCC Plug-ins PS PDF BibTeX Proceedings of the 2009 GCC Developers' Summit Jun 2009  
3 Software Monitoring with Bounded Overhead BibTeX NSF Next Generation Software Workshop (NSF NGS 2008) held in conjunction with the 22st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2008) Apr 2008  
4 Extending GCC with Modular GIMPLE Optimizations PS PDF BibTeX Proceedings of the 2007 GCC Developers' Summit Jul 2007  
5 Model Predictive Control for Memory Profiling PS PDF BibTeX NSF Next Generation Software Workshop (NSF NGS 2007) held in conjunction with the 21st IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2007) Mar 2007  
6 Compiler-Assisted Software Verification Using Plug-Ins PS PDF BibTeX NSF Next Generation Software Workshop (NSF NGS 2006) held in conjunction with the 20th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2006) Apr 2006  
7 Efficient and Safe Execution of User-Level Code in the Kernel PS PDF BibTeX NSF Next Generation Software Workshop, in conjunction with IPDPS 2005 Apr 2005  
8 High-Confidence Operating Systems PS PDF BibTeX Tenth ACM SIGOPS European Workshop Sep 2002  

Technical Reports:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Stopping Data Races Using Redflag PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-10-02 May 2010 M.S. Thesis
2 Flexible Debugging with Controllable Overhead PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-09-01 Aug 2009 Ph.D. Thesis
3 The Visual Development of GCC Plug-ins with GDE, PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-09-04 Apr 2009 M.S. Thesis
4 On the Role of Static Analysis in Operating System Checking and Runtime Verification PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-05-01 May 2005 Ph.D. Research Proficiency Exam (RPE)

Current Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Member Since
1 Justin Seyster PhD Jan 2006
2 Prabakar Radhakrishnan MS Jan 2010

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Sean Callanan PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2009 Technical Staff Member, Apple (Cupertino, CA)
2 Abhishek Rai PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2005 Member of the Technical Staff, Structured Data Access group, VMware, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
3 Daniel J. Dean MS Sep 2007 - Jun 2009 Medical University of South Carolina
4 Abhinav Duggal MS Sep 2008 - May 2010 Software Engineer II, Platform OS Group DataDomain Inc. (Santa Clara, CA)
5 Nishant Nagalia MS Sep 2002 - May 2004 Software Engineer, Ashley Laurent (Austin, TX)
6 Amit Purohit MS Sep 2001 - May 2003 Technical Staff Member, IBM India Research Lab (New Delhi, India)
7 Daniel J. Dean BS May 2006 - Aug 2007 Stony Brook U. CS M.S. program (Stony Brook, NY)

Sponsors:

# Sponsor Amount Period Type Title (click for award abstract)
1 NSF CSR--AES $830,000 2005-2009 PI CSR--AES: Runtime Monitoring and Model Checking for High-Confidence System Software

(Last updated: Wed Aug 18 19:47:47 EDT 2010)