Linux is increasingly used to power everything from embedded devices to supercomputers. Developers of such systems often start with a mainline kernel from kernel.org and then apply patches for their application domain. Many of these patches represent crosscutting concerns in that they do not fit within a single program module and are scattered throughout the kernel sources—easily affecting over...

Attacks on host computers by malicious peripherals are a growing problem; the inexorable advance of powerful, small, cheap peripherals, which attach to plug-and-play buses, has made such attacks easy to mount. At the same time, commodity operating systems lack systematic defenses. We present Cinch, a pragmatic response to this threat. Cinch transforms USB peripherals to untrusted network endpoi...

Methods based on projective geometry have become popular in machine vision because they lead to elegant mathematics, and easy-to-solve linear equations [Longuett-Higgins 81, Hartley 97a, Quan & Lan 99]. It is often not realized that one pays a heavy price for this. Such method do not correctly model the physics of image formation and as a result require more correspondences and are considerably...

This RFC comments on recent proposals to extend TCP. It argues that the backward compatible extensions proposed in RFC’s 1072 and 1185 should not be pursued, and proposes an alternative way to evolve the Internet protocol suite. Its purpose is to stimulate discussion in the Internet community.

Reynolds’ view of a storage cell as an expression-acceptor pair has been widely used by researchers. We present a different way of organizing semantics of state, and in particular game semantics, by adding to typing contexts a zone for global state. This has the following advantages. Firstly, it causes the “good variable” equations for references to be validated, and also the noninterference eq...

In this talk, I will give an overview of the various formal verification projects around the evolving seL4 microkernel, and discuss our experience in large-scale proof engineering and maintenance. In particular, the presentation will draw a picture of what these verifications mean and how they fit together into a whole. Among these are a number of firsts: the first code-level functional correct...