TrulyTrusted Operating System Environment

Modern computers are no longer traditional computers. Modern computers also include Smart devices such as sensors and surveillance cameras, embedded systems and Mobile devices. Such devices uses specialized hardware and specialized operating systems such as iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Firefox OS, Tizen etc are all vulnerable to attacks due to kernel bugs and errors. Recently, it has became almost impossible task to get rid of all the kernel bugs because these operating systems become huge software projects with many developers and vast amounts of code. Furthermore, a lot more code is constantly introduced to these operating systems kernels. Of course with new code comes a lot of new bugs. These bugs and vulnerabilities comes from the monolithic kernel approach that is used by all these operating systems. Under the monolithic kernel approach we create the kernel as large as possible with as many services and drivers as we can. The traditional benefit of this approach is that it eliminate interprocess communication and context switches and is considered more efficient then the competing "microkernel" approach. Furthermore, even if a new well performing microkernel operating system will be released it will still be insufficient because such operating system will have no applications! In this paper we present an infrastructure that can serve as mobile device OS with many significant services such as its network stack and file system implemented in user space. Furthermore, Our system is built on top of Linux and all normal Linux applications and environments should work on it without any customization when using our operating system as well. In our system we put significant parts of the classical kernel such as block layer, file system implementation and network stack and the drivers that support them on the userspace. The userspace is a "safe" location as far as bugs are concerned. User space implementation means that bugs on any of those software components can not be used for the purpose of "rooting" the device ( with or without the device owner consent) and breaking the trusted system approach. Our platform thus can be used for implementing trusted computing platform for mobile devices. We propose a solid system with benchmarks for user space drivers compared to kernel drives. The benefit of using our system is that even if we introduced a bug or included a bug in one of our subcomponents. The bug is introduced in user space level and should not affect other processes or the system to the extent a kernel bug would.