While an OS that doesn&#x27;t preserve state is an important component of Rutkowska&#x27;s proposal, and your OS might be one basis for that component, I don&#x27;t think this is &quot;mostly there&quot; in terms of everything that the paper discusses. Much of what&#x27;s new in the paper is about <i>hardware</i> issues, especially because it&#x27;s concerned with firmware attacks that are already being used by attackers like NSA, and that other people clearly understand how to develop in principle.<p>With these firmware attacks, compromising a device at one point in time may allow the compromise to persist even if the user reinstalls the OS or replaces it with a different one.<p>One way to see this paper is as a response to<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;hashdays&#x2F;why-johnny-cant-tell-if-he-is-compromised" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;hashdays&#x2F;why-johnny-cant-tell-if-h...</a><p>proposing more details of a safer future platform.<p>Right now, someone who can briefly get kernel-level control on a machine intended to run your OS might be able to reprogram the hard drive firmware. At that point you have a serious authenticity challenge when booting your OS, because the hard drive can alter the contents of particular binaries at the moment they&#x27;re read from disk. There are some powerful software-only defenses against this, but if an attacker knows which ones you use, they can probably design an attack that evades those.