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They didn’t build an operating system, they built a boot program that exposes the chip in a way an operating system doesn’t behave.
have a filesystem, userspace, peripheral support...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great analogy. Li-ion batteries have several layers of defense against exploding, one of which are vents that, if all else fails, let the hydrogen gas safely escape rather than building up. It's perfectly fair for independent testers to say "we haven't found any flaws in the protection circuitry yet, but we should bypass it to see if the vents work as designed".
I'm not disputing that it's fair to investigate that. What I'm asking is if it's fair to then call it a vulnerability without establishing that the thing is, in fact, vulnerable as a result. I would say it's like calling the battery a fire hazard if the vents don't work, but actually that's not analogous because the necessity for vents doesn't merely arise from the need to protect against bad design of the protection…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
have you considered forking existing OS and implementing changes that you needed instead? it's hard for me to justify the tremendous effort of implementing the OS from scratch, instead of adding the functionality that you need to for example linux or xv6. > (it) exposes primitives that let a single experiment switch privilege levels at runtime while executing the same instructions in the same address space. i think t…
From the article: > [...] they usually run their experiments on top of an operating system that was never built for the job. They open up macOS or Linux, patch the kernel by hand, and hope the modifications hold. The approach is unstable, hard to reproduce, and on Apple’s platforms, slated for deprecation. I'd also like to hear more about why that's a problem, not because I disagree, but because I don't know jack abo…
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Worth noting this is pretty standard university PR. It is written with author involvement so it’s likely technically correct but it is aimed at getting it picked up so it often makes it sound flowery and contains multiple descriptions of generally the same thing with different analogies or simplifications that anyone writing an article from this can parrot easily.