Security 

Peter A. Loscocco, Stephen D. Smalley, Patrick A. Muckelbauer, Ruth C. Taylor, S. Jeff Turner, John F. Farrell <tos@epoch.ncsc.mil> (National Security Agency): The Inevitability of Failure: The Flawed Assumption of Security in Modern Computing Environments 

Abstract  
Although public awareness of the need for security in computing systems is growing rapidly, current efforts to provide security are unlikely to succeed. Current security efforts suffer from the flawed assumption that adequate security can be provided in applications with the existing security mechanisms of mainstream operating systems. In reality, the need for secure operating systems is growing in today’s computing environment due to substantial increases in connectivity and data sharing. The goal of this paper is to motivate a renewed interest in secure operating systems so that future security efforts may build on a solid foundation. This paper identifies several secure operating system features which are lacking in mainstream operating systems, argues that these features are necessary to adequately protect general application-space security mechanisms, and provides concrete examples of how current security solutions are critically dependent on these features. 

Keywords: secure operating systems, mandatory security, trusted path, Java, Kerberos, IPSEC, SSL, firewalls. 
 

 

Simula 

 
 

Smalltalk 
by Adele Goldberg at Xerox PARC 
 

Social & General Systems 

Many problems in distributed Os's resemble problems in social systems, vice versa social systems play a role in our understanding and implementation of operating systems.

Sites 
Gene Bellinger's Systems. Understanding "the Way". Mental Model Musings 

Sombrero (Arizona State University)

SPACE (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Group Members: John Bruno, Dave Probert
SPACE is an approach to operating systems which uses multiple protection domains rather than a single kernel to provide operating system services. Multiple instances of fundamental paradigms, such as threads and virtual memory, can coexist, since they are implemented as applications code. All that is left in what was the operating system kernel is a set of mechanisms to implement the protection domains. In SPACE these mechanisms.can be replaced as needed by the application to provide a fundamental level of extensibility not available in other adaptive operating systems.

SPIN (University of Washington)
SPIN is one of several research systems that aims toward run-time flexibility and specialization using techniques like type-safe languages and dynamic code generation to make a fast, dynamic, flexible system. It is an extensible operating system micro-kernel that supports the dynamic adaptation of system interfaces and implementations through direct application control, while still maintaining system integrity and inter-application isolation.

Spring Real-Time Project (University of Massachsetts, Amherst)
The Spring kernel has been designed and implemented to support/provide predictability, on-line dynamic guarantees, atomic guarantees, end-to-end scheduling and resource reservations. It utilizes a micro-kernel design for multiprocessor architectures and provides an interface to remote processes, support for distributed shared memory, and predictable low level communication. The kernel exists as a component of Spring's integrated environment. This environment extracts significant semantic information and this information is used at runtime to support flexibility. (ed: This is not the same as the Spring OS from Sun, which unfortunately has the same name.)

Spring System (Sun)
Sun's  research kernel. Spring is a highly modular, object-oriented operating system, which is focused around a uniform interface definition language. Spring is intrinsically distributed, with all system interfaces being accessible both locally and remotely.

Sprite (University of California, Berkeley)
Sprite was a UNIX-like distributed operating system developed at Berkeley which ran on a number of different machines, and had a number of interesting features, such as load-balancing, a high-speed, aggressively-caching, distributed file-system, and a fast log-structured local file-system. Research on Sprite per-se come to an end, although various former members of the Sprite group are carrying on aspects of the original Sprite research.

Squeak
Homepage

Squeak is an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation whose virtual machine is written entirely in Smalltalk, making it easy to debug, analyze, and change. To achieve practical performance, a translator produces an equivalent C program whose performance is comparable to commercial Smalltalks.

Other noteworthy aspects of Squeak include 

•      real-time sound and music synthesis written entirely in Smalltalk 
•      extensions of BitBlt to handle color of any depth and anti-aliased image rotation and scaling 
•      network access support that allows simple construction of servers and other useful facilities 
•      it runs bit-identical on many platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix, and others) 
•      a compact object format that typically requires only a single word of overhead per object 
•      a simple yet efficient incremental garbage collector for 32-bit direct pointers 
•      efficient bulk-mutation of objects 

Squeak is available for free via the Internet, at this and other sites. Each release includes platform-independent support for color, sound, and network access, with complete source code. Originally developed on the Macintosh, members of its user community have since ported it to numerous other platforms including Windows 95 and NT, Windows CE (it runs on the Cassiopeia and the HP320LX), all common flavors of UNIX, Acorn RiscOS, and a bare chip (the Mitsubishi M32R/D).

To quote from Dwight Hughes, a frequent contributor to the Squeak mailing list, "How is Squeak important? Squeak extends the fundamental Smalltalk philosophy of complete openness -- where everything is available to see, understand, modify, and extend for whatever purpose -- to include even the VM. It is a genuine, complete, compact, efficient Smalltalk-80 environment (*not* a toy). It is not specialized for any particular hardware/OS platform. Porting is easy -- you are not fighting entrenched platform/OS dependencies to move to a new system or configuration. It has essentially been put into the public domain - greatly broadening potential interest, and potential applications. The core team behind Squeak includes Dan Ingalls, Alan Kay, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, and Scott Wallace. All of this has attracted many of the best and most experienced Smalltalk programmers and implementers in the world."

Squeak began, very simply, with the needs of a research group at Apple. We wanted a system as expressive and immediate as Smalltalk to pursue various application goals (prototypical educational software, user interface experiments and (let's be honest) another run at the Dynabook fence). As you can read in the OOPSLA paper ("Back to the Future") we hit on the idea of writing a Smalltalk interpreter in a subset of Smalltalk, together with a translator from that subset to C.

Smalltalk-80 was developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s. Apple obtained a license in 1980. A team at Apple developed Squeak in 1996, and have made it available free under license. The license agreement is intended to keep Squeak open and available to the user community, while allowing users to do useful things with Squeak. Here is a paraphrase of the license terms:

You are allowed to change Squeak, write extensions to Squeak, build an application in Squeak, and include some or all of Squeak with your products. You may distribute all of these things along with Squeak, or portions of Squeak, for free or for money. However, you must distribute these things under a license that protects Apple in the way described in this license.

If you modify any of the methods of class objects (or their relationships) that come with Squeak (as opposed to building on top of the classes in the release), you must post the modifications on a web site or otherwise make them available for free to others, just as has been done with Squeak. The same is true if you port Squeak to another machine or operating system - you must post your port on a web site or otherwise make it available for free to others under the same license terms.
 
 

Standardization 
Is one of the most important steps in modern industries. In Europe (except GB) standardization started with the french revolution and the metric system. As a positive side-effect of Napoleons wars on Europe(misnamed "liberation wars") they were introduced in (nearly) whole Europe, except Great Britain. The biggest impact on european science and the driving force on european quest for knowledge,  which gave science a tremendous push forward. (Even time was based on number 10 basis in french revolution. This was later abolished and system 12 time reestablished because of non acceptance in normal life.)

 American National Standards Institute 
11 West 42nd Street 
13th floor 
New York, N.Y. 10036 
Telephone:+ 1 212 642 49 00 
Telefax:+ 1 212 398 00 23 
E-mail:info@ansi.org 

Association française de normalisation 
Tour Europe 
F-92049 Paris La Défense Cedex 
Telephone:+ 33 1 42 91 55 55 
Telefax:+ 33 1 42 91 56 56 
E-mail:international@email.afnor.fr 

 Deutsches Institut für Normung

DIN Deutsches Institut
für Normung e. V.
Burggrafenstr. 6
10787 Berlin
Telefon +49 30 2601-0
Fax +49 30 2601-1260

Sting
Sting is an experimental operating system designed to serve as an efficient customizable substrate for modern programming languages. The base language used in our current implementation is Scheme, but Sting's core ideas could be incorporated into any reasonably high-level language. The ultimate goal in this project is to build a unified programming environment for parallel and distributed computing.

STOS (Atari ST OS - Freeware)(outdated) 

Clickteam provides the source code of STOS and AMOS as a courtesy to the Atari ST and Amiga computer community. You are allowed to edit and modify the source code, add new features, remove sections of code and recompile it to produce modified final products. 
Any product made from the original source code should contain this written notification: 
"Contains parts of AMOS (or STOS) source code, originally written by François Lionet and published by 
Europress Software Ltd. Contact the original authors at www.clickteam.com." 
 

Sumo (Lancaster University)
Related to: Chorus
Over the past few years members of the SUMO team have been designing and implementing a microkernel based system with facilities to support distributed real-time and multimedia applications and ODP based multimedia distributed application platforms. We are interested in both communications and processing support for distributed real-time/ multimedia applications in end systems, and believe that such applications require thread-to-thread real-time support according to user supplied quality of service (QoS) parameters.

Sun 
Sun was founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Bill Joy, 

SunOS 
SunOS aka Solaris 1 was developed 1985 from BSD 4.2. 

Solaris 2 emerged 1993 out of USLs System V.4. Has second largest Unix market share (10/99: 22,2%) after SCO-Unix (10/99: 39,8%). 

Synthesis (Columbia University)
Group Members: Henry Massalin
The Synthesis kernel was one of the first modern operating system projects to use run-time code generation (which Massalin called code synthesis) and fine-grained scheduling to construct a system that responded quickly and dynamically to high-speed devices. The main "draw-back" of Synthesis was that it was written is 68000 macro-assembler. Synthesis has influnced most of the modern extensible research operating systems, including SPIN, Aegis, Scout, and Synthetix.

Synthetix (Oregon Graduate Institute)

The Synthetix project is investigating the application of a technique called incremental specialization, a combination of fine-grain modularity and dynamic code generation, to create operating systems which are both highly modular and high-performance. Incremental specialization takes advantage of particular circumstances, not just at compile time, but also at load time and run time, to make specialized optimizations.

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