Secure Operating Systems

The Secure Operating Systems research department has many years of experience in the field of platform security. Among other things, the department's scientists design and implement secure processes for bootstrapping and updating modern, especially embedded, systems. Furthermore, they develop secure architectures that incorporate advanced security technologies such as Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) or secure coprocessors. In addition to integrity, the confidentiality and resilience of the platforms under investigation also play a crucial role. Here, the research department is developing new methods to make various target platforms resistant to physical attackers.

Operating systems form the basis of virtually every IT system. They serve as the interface between hardware and applications. Due to their privileged position, they play a particularly important role with regard to the security of a system.

The research department Secure Operating Systems deals with the security of all types of operating systems and can draw on many years of experience in this area. The department’s research primarily focuses on the security of Linux-based systems. Here, the researchers of the department work on new architectures and features, aiming to harden the kernel and the overall system against a wide range of attacks.

To save resources and costs, several physical systems are often integrated into one system. Since the integrated devices often perform tasks of different criticality, the respective functional groups must be isolated from each other in the remaining physical system. Virtualization is one possible technique to achieve such isolation.

The Secure Operating Systems group has many years of experience in developing, evaluating and improving virtualization techniques. Especially in the context of Linux-based systems, the department’s researchers analyse and improve various possibilities of virtualization, e.g., in the form of containers or kernel-based virtual machines (KVM) and develop new security methods and architectures using virtualization.

A large number of software vulnerabilities and resulting, sometimes massive, security problems in modern IT systems arise from the use of insecure programming languages. Especially in the area of hardware-related software, where speed and direct access to the system are crucial, insecure languages such as C/C++ are often used.
The Secure Operating Systems research area develops concepts and methods to address these problems, especially in the context of operating system development. To this end, the unit's staff analyse existing security mechanisms and develop new mechanisms for protecting system software, e.g., in the form of compiler extensions for Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) and Memory Safety, also considering novel hardware features.

System software components are often highly complex and written in unsafe programming languages. This often leads to heavily error-prone source code in development.

The research department Secure Operating Systems can draw on rich experience in automated security testing for software components and entire IT systems and develops, among other things, new methods for static code analysis and for dynamic testing, especially fuzzing.

The staff of the Secure Operating Systems research department have many years of experience with software architectures for embedded systems in the automobile domain.

The focus here is on high-performance ECUs and the software architectures used on them. AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) pursues the goal of developing an open and standardized software architecture for Electronic Control Units (ECUs) in vehicles. The AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform addresses Linux-based systems, for example in the area of infotainment or driver assistance systems.

Mobile devices and applications are omnipresent these days. They permeate the modern working world, control industrial plants, medical devices, are used for payment transactions, and must meet high security requirements in the process.
The staff of the Secure Operating Systems research area have many years of diverse experience with operating systems and security-critical applications for mobile devices. In 2012, employees of the research area developed an attestation protocol for baseband stacks, in 2013 an operating system level virtualization based on Android, and in 2014 TrustID, a solution for deriving digital identities of the nPA.

Embedded systems can be found in more and more objects in our everyday lives. Such embedded systems perform diverse, demanding and sometimes security-critical tasks.

The research area Secure Operating Systems develops secure embedded platforms with a hardened kernel and operating system stack, hardware security tokens, trusted execution environments and virtualization for strong isolation. The goal is the reliable and secure operation of (networked) embedded systems and the integration of security features into these devices, which are usually resource-limited.

Trusted Computing describes technologies and solution approaches for improving IT security through hardware enhancements and the associated software solutions. Several major hardware manufacturers and software providers have joined forces in the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and are jointly developing concrete strategies for securing systems, networks and applications.

Fraunhofer AISEC is a member of the TCG and develops solutions to protect critical data and systems from the growing number of attacks and to ensure regulatory compliance through hardware- and software-based solutions. For this purpose, Fraunhofer AISEC bundles competencies from different areas of expertise.