The case for less predictable operating system behavior
Ruimin Sun, Donald E. Porter, Daniela Seabra Oliveira, Matt Bishop · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2015
No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected."Julius CaesarThe operating system is increasingly regarded as untrustworthy.Applications, hardware, and hypervisors are erecting defenses to insulate themselves from the operating system.This paper explores the potential benefits if operating systems simply embraced these lowered expectations and deliberately varied API behavior.We argue that, even for trusted or benign applications, diversity roughly within the specification can improve resilience to attack and improve robustness.Malicious software tends to be brittle; a preliminary case study indicates that, for software of questionable origin, a somewhat hostile operating system may do more good than harm for system security.This paper describes the architecture of Chameleon, an ongoing project to implement spectrumbehavior as an operating system feature.