Unikernels are secure
unikernel.org
Unikernels are secure
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Re: Unikernels are secure
#2The argument that something IS secure is somehow supported by a whole lot of hypotheticals of the form "we could do $X and that would be secure if someone also did $Y".
So say it how it is: unikernels COULD be secure if all this work that needs to be done and we haven't done was done...maybe
Re: Unikernels are secure
#3In addition to the blog post, there's an interesting discussion on Github that happened before the blog post was published: https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/pull/45
Re: Unikernels are secure
#4It's secure if and only if there's a formal proof.
Re: Unikernels are secure
#5Hypothetically, if there were a buffer overflow in a unikernel process, wouldn't it potentially give the exploit full-system access, whereas a normal operating system would detect the out-of-bounds memory access and kill the process? I'm sorry if this is an ignorant question.
Re: Unikernels are secure
#6The intro video is somewhat confusing - it indicates that they're secure but if that they're "harder to attack" and says if they are compromised they can be restored. Also, he said "in the future, I believe unikernels will be more or less unbreakable"
I think you could describe that as "more secure" or perhaps more generically "safer" rather than "secure."
Re: Unikernels are secure
#7Hypothetically, if there were a buffer overflow in a unikernel process, wouldn't it potentially give the exploit full-system access, whereas a normal operating system would detect the out-of-bounds memory access and kill the process? I'm sorry if this is an ignorant question.
I'm not super familiar with this, but it seems like the question is what is "full-system" in this case if each application is sandboxed with its own embedded kernel? I mean there's no shell, ostensibly all other applications and system functions are bundled similarly, right?
Re: Unikernels are secure
#8It's secure if and only if there's a formal proof.
"Secure" sounds like a binary attribute but it's actually not. A formal proof doesn't save you from errors in the specification. At some point you need trust, the amount of trust needed is inversely proportional to the security.
Re: Unikernels are secure
#9In addition to the blog post, there's an interesting discussion on Github that happened before the blog post was published: https://github.com/Unikernel-Systems/unikernel.org/pull/45
Excellent discussion. I'm not knowledgeable enough in Linux internals to know whether the ring0 versus ring3 criticism is warranted. Is it just a matter of if/when an attacker achieves escalated privileges they will have far more attack surface on ring0?
Re: Unikernels are secure
#10I don't really like the argument that something is 'secure' because it is not vulnerable in the same ways that an alternative is. I think this is why I like talking about encryption so much. It's possible to mathematically prove the security of encryption algorithms, and all that's really left to pick apart is the implementation, politics and impact.