Hi, after a long time of following this list only passively, I would like to share some of my thoughts with the other list members :-)
Background: I am working/researching/developing microkernel-based security architectures for a few years now, currently at Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB), Germany. At the moment, our group is involved in some R&D projects related to trusted computing (TC) and security in general: E.g., PERSEUS (perseus-os.org), EMSCB (emscb.org), OTC (opentc.net), and some others. In this context, we are developing security-critical services and applications on top of L4 and Xen. Further important topics are security engineering, formal models, language-based security, and security protocols. General: Since I am not aware of a multi-server system designs that fulfills today's requirements, our group has to design and implement a lot of services from scratch - wasting a lot of time, since our main focus is security. Therefore, we would like to collaborate with further projects like hurd and coyotos, to share design ideas, use cases and implementations. Unfortunately, this seems to be impossible due to conflicting requirements (at least with hurd): We are using TC technology and we are even developing DRM-like applications (whatever this means). We do this for the following reasons: On the one hand, it is IMO better to prove that a better solutions exists if you want to criticise existing technology (and we criticise TC a lot, e.g., have a look at some research papers and our TPM compliance test..) On the other hand, TC is currently a technology that is widely available and fulfills (IMO) important security requirements. Yes, it could be misused (like nearly any security-related product), but our main develop/reasearch goal is an architecture that prevents misuse but allows many relevant use cases. The same holds for the DRM-like applications: We develop applications that allow the enforcement of security policies in a distributed environment, but which consider user rights and the law (keywords: multilateral security, fair use). Challenge: I would like to give a more concrete example of an application that IMO requires confinement and TC as a possible instance to fulfill this requirement: As you may know, we have in Germany strict laws regarding user privacy. E.g., a company is in general not allowed to give personal information to other institutions. Nevertheless, it is sometimes hard to prove that there was a leakage of information, or companies may be in another country. Therefore, one of our goals is to develop an environment that allows users to create an agent that controls their personal information and enforces, e.g., within the environment of a company, that it can only use personal information once, or that it cannot be shared with other companies, etc. But this requires that the owner of the platform executing the agent cannot access the internal state of the agent. A lot of people would call the agent a DRM application... Another application, currently an (open) master thesis, is to develop a P2P filesharing client that uses DAA to connect to other clients. The motivation is to prevent modified clients that allow the platform owner to see the connection table (and thus to uncover the anonymity of clients). But this only makes sense if the platform owner cannot access the internal state of applications... I would like to know to what extend people here are interested in a collaboration. If you think this is too OT to discuss it here, we can continue this discussion somewhere else.. Regards, Chris _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
