Total Installation Awareness

Users often install applications from untrusted sources. Alcatraz is a system that provides isolation of a system from potentially untrustworthy user programs. However, we find performance and functionality concerns with Alcatraz. Nevertheless, Alcatraz demonstrates the feasibility of one-way isolation of user programs. During a port of Alcatraz to a modern commodity operating system, Mac OS X, we observe that the various security goals present in such a system can be at odds with each other. This conflict impedes implementation of features such as isolation. We propose an alternative that preserves system adaptability properties while still serving the trusted platform needs of DRM. A substantially different approach to implementing one-way isolation appears feasible, and is left for future work.