This section highlights some of the projects which are underway in Ethos. This list is not exhaustive: Some projects are new and have not been disclosed, others are multifaceted containing security as just one component.
Projects
Projects exists at the center for a wide
variety of different projects including
authorization, authentication, certificates,
cryptography, secure software,
complexity of authorization systems, and
formal methods of secure systems.
Projects
- Kernel hacking: building an OS requires building a kernel. We are implementing a kernel in C on top of Xen. Ethos started from a small OS in Xen called Minimal OS which provided low-level facilties which we extended and added many facilities. Kernel hacking divides into architecture dependent code (eg., for interrupts, context switching, paging) and architecture independent code (eg., authorization, authentication, file systems, etc.)
- User-space OS components: much of an OS is written in user space. There are many user-space components to build, including packages, shells, and OS abstractions. We're using Go to write these routines.
- Distributed services: we're working on building highly secure distributed services. The first service is SayI, an authentication service.
- Applications: an OS without applications is incomplete. We need to see what effect Ethos has on application code.
- Ethos scripting language: El.
- High speed crypto: Investigation and design of high speed cryptography algorithms and implementations which will make cryptography sufficiently inexpensive to be used universally. (PI: Daniel J. Bernstein)