Even more patterns for secure operating systems

Abstract

An operating system (OS) interacts with the hardware and supports the execution of all the applications. As a result, its security is very critical. Many of the reported attacks to Internetbased systems have occurred through the OS (kernel and utilities). The security of individual execution time actions such as process creation, memory protection, and the general architecture of the OS are very important and we have previously presented patterns for these functions. We present here patterns for the representation of processes and threads, emphasizing their security aspects. Another pattern considers the selection of virtual address space structure. We finally present a pattern to control the power of administrators, a common source of security problems.