Genode Labs - Newsletter Archive

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 Genode Labs Newsletter - January 2009
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 Content

 1. Genode on L4ka::Pistachio kernel
 2. Visit us at the Embedded World exhibition 2009
 3. Dissertation on Securing Graphical User Interfaces


 1. Genode on the L4ka::Pistachio kernel
 ---------------------------------------

 In the mid of December, we have made the port of the Genode
 OS Framework to the L4ka::Pistachio kernel publicly available.
 L4ka::Pistachio is a high-performance L4 microkernel implementing
 the latest official L4 API. This kernel is developed in joint
 work of the University of Karlsruhe and the University of New
 South Wales. It is used as basis for both academic research
 projects and commercial applications. With this modern kernel
 having become available as a platform for Genode, we are able
 to advance Genode towards virtualization and multi-processor
 support.

   http://www.l4ka.org/projects/pistachio/

 The port of Genode to L4ka::Pistachio was initially done by
 Julian Stecklina as a student research project at the University
 of Technology Dresden. In cooperation, we integrated his work
 with the mainline Genode development. The L4ka::Pistachio version
 is now available at our subversion repository and will become a
 regular part of the official Genode distribution with upcoming
 release scheduled for February. For a quick test of Genode on
 Pistachio, we have compiled a small (3MB) ISO image:

   http://genode.org/genode-2008-12.iso

 You can run this image via qemu ('qemu -cdrom genode-2008-12.iso').
 It features our default demonstration scenario including several
 graphical applications and native device drivers for VESA and PS/2
 input. For more technical information about using Genode on
 L4ka::Pistachio please refer to the following Wiki page:

   http://genode.org/community/wiki/GenodeOnL4kaPistachio


 2. Visit us at the Embedded World exhibition 2009
 -------------------------------------------------

 Thanks to the kind support of Trenz Electronic, we have the
 opportunity to present Genode Labs as co-exhibitor at this year's
 Embedded World exhibition. The focus of our presentation will
 be our FPGA-based GUI solution called Genode FX. If you are
 interested in seeing Genode FX in action or in meeting us in
 person, we invite you to visit at the embedded world:

   Nuremberg, Germany
   March 03-05, 2009
   Visit us: hall 12, booth 12-536


 3. Dissertation on Securing Graphical User Interfaces
 -----------------------------------------------------

 On 5th of January, Founding member of Genode Labs Norman Feske
 successfully defended his dissertation on Securing Graphical
 User Interfaces and thereby earned the academic title Dr.-Ing.
 The dissertation covers more than 5 years of research about
 the design and implementation of graphical user interfaces
 in the context of security-sensitive and real-time systems:

   Malware such as Trojan Horses and spyware remain to be
   persistent security threats that exploit the overly complex
   graphical user interfaces of today's commodity operating
   systems. Current GUI architectures have to find a balance
   between the four conflicting goals of maintaining compatibility
   to existing applications, providing quality of service,
   operating at high performance, and of being secure, whereby
   the latter goal still remains widely disregarded by mainstream
   GUI architectures. The challenge of my work was to resolve the
   conflict. I developed key techniques and substantiated the
   concepts by a number of exhaustive experiments. The resulting
   architecture consolidates the advantages of extremely low
   source-code complexity, full client isolation, protection
   against spyware and Trojan Horses, bounded output latency, and
   compatibility to existing applications into one GUI-server
   design.

 We plan to make the full text of the document publicly available
 soon.


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 --------------------

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 Best regards
 -- 
 Norman Feske
 Genode Labs

 http://www.genode-labs.com · http://genode.org