Operating Systems Part 2: Further Readings

Linux: Disk, Network, and Other I/Os

• Fischer, Linux Storage Stack Diagram. A much more detailed overview of the components of the Linux storage stack.
• (book) Love, Linux Kernel Development. Old but still relevant, check out chapters 13-16.
• (book) Bovet and Cesati, Understanding the Linux Kernel. Check out chapters from “The Virtual Filesystem” up to “The ext3 Filesystem”.
• Mathur et al., The new ext4 filesystem: current status and future plans. Describes the ext4 filesystem’s design (ext4 is the default concrete root filesystem in most Linux distribution).
• (book) Benvenuti, Understanding Linux Network Internals.
• (book) Corbet et al., Linux Device Drivers.

OS Security Concepts

• Chen et al., Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities: State-of-the-Art Defenses and Open Problems.
• Wang et. al., How Double-Fetch Situations turn into Double Fetch Vulnerabilities: A Study of Double Fetches in the Linux Kernel.
• Kemerlis et al., kGuard: Lightweight Kernel Protection against Return-to-user Attacks.
• Kemerlis et al., ret2dir: Rethinking Kernel Isolation.
• Hardy, The Confused Deputy: (or why capabilities might have been invented).
• Linux Test Project Contributors, Linux Test Project’s GitHub repository.
• Google, Syzkaller’s GitHub repository.
• (book) Jaeger, Operating System Security.
• Anderson, Security Engineering. Chapters available for free in PDF here.

Trusted Execution Environments

• Georgia Tech’s SSLAB, SGX 101.
• Confidential Computing Consortium, A Technical Analysis of Confidential Computing.
• ARM documentation, Learn the architecture - TrustZone for AArch64.

OS Models and Security

• Herder et al., MINIX 3: A highly reliable, self-repairing operating system.
• Biggs et al., The Jury Is In: Monolithic OS Design Is Flawed, Microkernel-based Designs Improve Security.
• Engler et al., Exokernel: An operating system architecture for application-level resource management.
• Madhavapeddy et al., Unikernels: Library Operating Systems for the Cloud.