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 InterAspect: Aspect-Oriented Instrumentation with GCC TBA Apr 2011 Under review
2 Software Monitoring with Controllable Overhead PS PDF BibTeX International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT) Dec 2010  

Conference and Workshop Papers:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Redflag: A framework for analysis of kernel-level concurrency PS PDF BibTeX 11th International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing (ICA3PP'11) Oct 2011  
2 Runtime verification with state estimation PS PDF BibTeX 2nd International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV 2011) Sep 2011 Won Best Paper Award
3 Aspect-Oriented Instrumentation with GCC PS PDF BibTeX 1st International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV 2010) Nov 2010  
4 The Visual Development of GCC Plug-ins PS PDF BibTeX Proceedings of the 2009 GCC Developers' Summit Jun 2009  
5 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  
6 Extending GCC with Modular GIMPLE Optimizations PS PDF BibTeX Proceedings of the 2007 GCC Developers' Summit Jul 2007  
7 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  
8 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  
9 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  
10 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 Mandar S Joshi MS Sep 2011
3 Atul Karmarkar MS Jan 2012

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Sean Callanan PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2009 Debugging Tools Engineer, Xcode group, Apple (Cupertino, CA)
2 Abhishek Rai PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2005 Member of the Technical Staff, Google (Mountain View, CA)
3 Daniel J. Dean MS Sep 2007 - Jun 2009 North Carolina State U. CS. Ph.D. program (Raleigh, NC)
4 Abhinav Duggal MS Sep 2008 - May 2010 Senior Software Engineer, Filesystems Group EMC/DataDomain (Bangalore, India)
5 Samriti Katoch MS Sep 2010 - Dec 2011  
6 Nishant Nagalia MS Sep 2002 - May 2004 Software Engineer, Ashley Laurent (Austin, TX)
7 Amit Purohit MS Sep 2001 - May 2003  
8 Prabakar Radhakrishnan MS Jan 2010 - Dec 2010 Software Engineer, Search Quality group Google (Mountain View, CA)
9 Siddhi Tadpatrikar MS Jan 2011 - Dec 2011  
10 Daniel J. Dean BS May 2006 - Aug 2007 North Carolina State U. CS. Ph.D. program (Raleigh, NC)

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: Fri Jan 27 15:27:56 EST 2012)