Crafting a usable microkernel, processor, and I/O system with strict and provable information flow security

Abstract

High assurance systems used in avionics, medical implants, and cryptographic devices often rely on a small trusted base of hardware and software to manage the rest of the system. Crafting the core of such a system in a way that achieves flexibility, security, and performance requires a careful balancing act. Simple static primitives with hard partitions of space and time are easier to analyze formally, but strict approaches to the problem at the hardware level have been extremely restrictive, failing to allow even the simplest of dynamic behaviors to be expressed.