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198277 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.198277 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2024 68 pages Masters Thesis Academic theses Text eng Moore, Peter Kinsy, Michel Ahmad, Adil Andrade, Dhiego Arizona State University Partial requirement for: M.S., Arizona State University, 2024 Field of study: Computer Science Memory safety is one of the most important issues in software today. It encompasses a wide range of security vulnerabilities, including several that are consistently ranked highly in MITRE’s list of the most dangerous software weakness (2023). These vulnerabilities have been documented and fought against since at least 1972 (Meer et al., 2010). However, previous solutions have failed to prevent memory corruption attacks because they fail to address the underlying structural issues with how we access memory (Saito et al., 2016). In A Path Toward Secure and Measurable Software, the White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director described reducing memory safety vulnerabilities at scale as an important ”fundamental shift” (2024). Capabilities represent such a fundamental shift in how memory is accessed. A capability architecture can provide guarantees about memory safety by checking an unforgeable access token on every memory access. This ensures that every actor accessing a memory location is either the owner of the location or has received permission from the owner to perform that access. In order to ensure that the security guarantees provided by capabilities are held throughout the software stack, a capability-aware ecosystem is needed. One vital piece of any such ecosystem is an operating system. The OS is responsible for managing all the hardware and software in a system. As such, the OS must have a great amount of control over the system’s hardware and software. Capabilities provide a higher degree of control than is currently possible. This dissertation proposes a capability-aware operating system, and analyzes the work needed to harden and optimize such a system. It describes the various roles of the modern OS, and investigates how those roles might be changed by capabilities. Finally, it discusses ZenOS, an implementation of and foundation for a capability-aware OS that has been designed RISC-V non-atomic capabilities. Computer Science Capabilities Memory Safety Operating System Capability-Aware Operating System Design and ZenOS