[Cryptography] Open Source Sandboxes to Enforce Security on Proprietary Code?

[Jerry Leichter]

A fascinating bit of work on the inverse problem:  Running an application securely under a hostile OS:  http://sva.cs.illinois.edu/pubs/VirtualGhost-ASPLOS-2014.pdf

Basic idea:  Use virtualization techniques on a process-by-process level.  The hypervisor considers every page of memory to be in of two states:  Accessible to a particular process; accessible to the OS.  On the transition from process to OS, encrypt and checksum it; on the transition back, verify and decrypt.  So the OS can screw up a process - but can't see any of its actual data.

There's obviously much more to it than that, but it's really clever stuff.  In a way, you can think of this as taking the very old idea of the security kernel into the modern era by completely divorcing it from the OS.

                                                        -- Jerry