Ailsa Sun L&S Math & Physical Sciences
Empirical Analysis of Side-Channel Attacks on Commercial Microkernels
For all of the 21st century, monolithic kernels have dominated the operating-system landscape. Recently, Chinese systems infrastructure has grown largely independent from Western codebases, with companies deploying Hongmeng, HarmonyOS, and Kylin microkernels to commercial devices across Asia. Despite the magnitude of users adopting these systems, security literature has remained focused on western targets. We propose a first probe into the security attributes of HarmonyOS 5, narrowing our focus to side channel attacks. Microkernels rely on heavily optimized IPC (Inter-Process Communication) protocols and thoughtful use of shared memory. Side channels are known to exist outside of the scope of scalable formal verification, which is presently a major strength of microkernel security, and previous efforts to profile side-channels on microkernels are now outdated. Our research goals are two-fold – to reverse engineer the IPC protocol on HarmonyOS, and to make a first step towards characterizing the vulnerability of commercial microkernels to side channel attacks.
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Hi there, thanks for much for funding my Summer! I cannot begin to express how grateful I am - research has and continues to be one of the most impactful aspects of my undergraduate experience. It is an exciting time for hardware security, and I am determined to help create a more secure and open computing infrastructure. I have no stronger vision for the future, and your gift is a precious first step towards realizing this dream.