OSCAR Lab

Current Projects

Azkaban

Using hardware memory isolation to secure containers on a legacy, monolithic kernel

BetrFS

The B^ε-tree File System, or BetrFS, is an in-kernel file system that uses B^ε-trees to organize on-disk storage. The advantage of a B^ε-tree is that it can also ingest small, random writes 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than B-trees and other standard on-disk data structures.

Gramine Library OS

A library OS for Linux multi-process applications, with Intel SGX support, formerly Graphene.

Linux Optimizations

We’re always looking at ways to make linux more secure and performant, and compatible.

Mosaic: Reduced Associativity Paging

The Mosaic project investigates the viability of using restricted page mapping to improve caching of address translation in CPUs.

Secure Mobile Storage

Investigating techniques to attack and secure the storage on phones, wearables, and other embedded devices.

Sinter

System support for portable assistive technologies, primarily for blind and low-vision computer users.

Completed Projects

API-Study

This is an API study that reassuringly answers the questions of system developers, from planning stage to your operating system’s release. Featuring an API-by-API look at the growth of your operating system and complete chapters on development strategies, evaluation, maintaining APIs — and more.

HOSS: Pedagogical Hypervisor

HOSS is an extension of MIT’s JOS exokernel operating system to host itself as a hypervisor. Like JOS, HOSS includes a set of guided exercises implementing core system components.

Laminar

Laminar is the first system to implement the decentralized information flow control (DIFC) model using a single set of abstractions for OS resources and heap-allocated objects.

Measuring Security

You can’t improve what you can’t measure; we want to improve system security

Obviating Setuid-to-root Binaries

We are exploring techniques to remove the need for trusted, setuid-to-root binaries on Linux, reducing the system’s trusted computing base.

Plausible Deniability

Investigating techniques to attack and secure the storage on phones, wearables, and other embedded devices.

S2OS

Software-Defined Infrastructure for the entire data center, from networking down to applications

Talk to My Neighbors Transport

We’re investigating programmability, security and performance issues in systems with multiple accelerators

TxOS

TxOS is a variant of Linux that provides transactional semantics for a group of system calls. A system transaction executes a series of system calls in isolation from the rest of the system and atomically publishes the effects to the rest of the system.

UI-Adaption

Discovering Patterns for Adapting Smartphone App UIs to Smart Watches.

UIWear

Improving the usability and performance of Wearables

Versioned programming

A simple technique for implementing efficient, lock-free, and composable data structures