The "kernel" model has been part of operating system archi- tecture for decades, but upon closer inspection it clearly violates the principle of least required privilege. The kernel is a single entity which provides many services (memory management, interfacing to drivers, context switching, IPC) having no real relation to each other, and has the ability to observe or tamper with all state of the system. This work presents Antikernel, a novel operating system architecture consisting of both hardware and software components and designed to be fundamen- tally more secure than the state of the art. To make formal verification easier, and improve parallelism, the Antikernel system is highly modu- lar and consists of many independent hardware state machines (one or more of which may be a general-purpose CPU running application or sys- tems software) connected by a packet-switched network-on-chip (NoC). We create and verify an FPGA-based prototype of the system.
['Andrew D. Zonenberg', 'Bülent Yener']
Antikernel: A decentralized secure hardware-software operating system architecture