SBIR-STTR Award

Viewprinting Processes and Then Isolating Them Within Filesystem Views
Award last edited on: 2/23/2007

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : DARPA
Total Award Amount
$100,000
Award Phase
1
Solicitation Topic Code
SB041-016
Principal Investigator
Hans Reiser

Company Information

Namesys Inc

6979 Exeter Drive
Oakland, CA 94611
   (510) 482-2483
   reiser@namesys.com
   www.namesys.com
Location: Single
Congr. District: 13
County: Alameda

Phase I

Contract Number: ----------
Start Date: ----    Completed: ----
Phase I year
2004
Phase I Amount
$100,000
System administrators who are serious about ensuring that the consequences of a process being compromised by an attack are minimized currently engage in a painfully labor intensive procedure of creating a tree with all of the files the process needs to run, and then chrooting the process to that tree. This procedure is so painful that most administrators don't do it. We will make it easy. We will make it easy by: * containing processes in filesystem views, which are a more powerful expression of chroot * making it trivial to automatically assemble a list of all accesses a monitored process makes (a "viewprint") * creating that list in the same format as the specification of a view that can access only those files * creating a mechanism for allowing administrators to optionally be prompted when a process tries to exceed its viewprint, so that they can amend the viewprint or be alerted to danger * creating a moderated website and mailing list for sharing view specifications * pushing view specifications to package maintainers and Linux distributors * encouraging distributors to make all processes they can, be isolated into views by default, by making it easy to do and an important sales bullet item

Phase II

Contract Number: ----------
Start Date: ----    Completed: ----
Phase II year
----
Phase II Amount
----