Given today’s common hardware and software architectural paradigms, operating systems security is a major primitive for secure systems – you will not succeed without it. This area is so important that it needs all the emphasis it can get. It is the current ‘black hole’ of security.

The problem is innately difficult because from the beginning (ENIAC, 1944), due to the high cost of components, computers were built to share resources (memory, processors, buses, etc.). If you look for a one-word synopsis of computer design philosophy, it was and is SHARING. In the security realm, the one word synopsis is SEPARATION: keeping the bad guys away from the good guys’ stuff!

So today, making a computer secure requires imposing a ‘separation paradigm’ on top of an architecture built to share. That is tough! Even when partially successful, the residual problem is going to be covert channels.