<i>Writing is Nature&#x27;s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is</i> -- Guindon<p>From what I understand of MirageOS an impetus for the &quot;security theatre,&quot; is that they believe <i>libc</i> itself is a vulnerability. Therefore no matter how secure their applications are they will always be vulnerable. They will be vulnerable to the host OS as well as any process it is running and the vulnerabilities they expose. It&#x27;s not <i>security by obscurity</i> but a reduction in attack surface which is a well-known and encouraged tactic. I don&#x27;t see any prepositional tautology there.<p>Yes they will still be reliant on Type-1 hypervisors... and Xen has had its share of vulnerabilities in the last year. That&#x27;s a much smaller surface to worry about.<p>The other benefit is that <i>jitsu</i> could be one interesting avenue to further reduce the attack surface. Summoning a unikernel <i>on-demand</i> to service a single request has demonstrated to be plausible. Instead of leaving a long-running process running you have a highly-restricted machine summon your application process in an isolated unikernel for a few milliseconds before it&#x27;s gone.<p>The kinds of architectures unikernels enable have yet to be fully explored. The ideas being explored by MirageOS are by no means new but they haven&#x27;t been given serious consideration. They may not be &quot;ready for production,&quot; yet but given some experimentation and formal specification it may yet prove fruitful.