Microkernel Mechanisms for Improving the Trustworthiness of Commodity Hardware

Abstract

Trustworthy isolation is required to consolidate safety and security critical software systems on a single hardware platform. Recent advances in formally verifying correctness and isolation properties of a microkernel should enable mutually distrusting software to co-exist on the same platform with a high level of assurance of correct operation. However, commodity hardware is susceptible to transient faults triggered by cosmic rays, and alpha particle strikes, and thus may invalidate the isolation guarantees, or trigger failure in isolated applications. To increase trustworthiness of commodity hardware, we apply redundant execution techniques from the dependability community to a modern microkernel. We leverage the hardware redundancy provided by multicore processors to perform transient fault detection for applications and for the microkernel itself. This paper presents the mechanisms and framework for microkernel based systems to implement redundant execution for improved trustworthiness. It evaluates the performance of the resulting system on x86-64 and ARM platforms.