A secure operating system for the internet of things
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The Internet of Things describes the phenomenon of connecting low-resource edge devices to the Internet. This phenomenon, while exciting, uncovers safety, performance, and flexibility challanges for the low-resource computers. In particular, the microcontrollers that power these devices lack some of the hardware features and memory resources that enable multiprogrammable systems. Accordingly, microcontroller-based operating systems have not provided important features like fault isolation, dynamic memory allocation, and flexible concurrency. However, the Internet of Things changes these devices into software platforms, rather than single purpose devices, requiring multiprogramming features. This dissertation describes Tock, a new operating system for low-power platforms, that takes advantage of the limited hardware-protection mechanisms of contemporary microcontrollers as well as the type-safe features of the Rust programming language to provide a multiprogramming environment for microcontrollers. Tock isolates software faults, provides memory protection, and efficiently manages memory for dynamic application workloads written in any language. It achieves this while retaining the dependability requirements of long-running applications. The trade-off between extensibility, safety, and performance is long standing in operating systems. More specifically, prior systems in the research have attempted to use language type safety to replace, or augment, hardware-based isolation mechanisms in the kernel. However, these systems used garbage collected languages, generally viewed as too resource-heavy for kernel programming in production systems. Tock's use of Rust shows that, given a type-safe language with sufficient control of memory and processor resources, language-based approaches can be _more_ efficient than hardware. Moreover, Tock's use in academia and industry show that this approach is practical in real-world deployments.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2018; ©2018 |
| Publication date | 2018; 2018 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Levy, Amit Aryeh |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Mazières, David (David Folkman), 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Mazières, David (David Folkman), 1972- |
| Thesis advisor | Levis, Philip |
| Thesis advisor | Winstein, Keith |
| Degree committee member | Levis, Philip |
| Degree committee member | Winstein, Keith |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Computer Science Department. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Amit Aryeh Levy. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Computer Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2018. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2018 by Amit Aryeh Levy
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
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