Unhackable across 30 Years, End in Sight
summary
Describes a multidecade effort starting from a 1988 nano‑kernel design at Bell Labs toward an unhackable boot and system, motivating cryptographically secure chip‑level boot assistance and ECC work used later at NeXT and Apple. Covers a space of defenses against social attacks and weak memory models with new hardware, and explains lockless queuing primitives that implement a multi‑core actor runtime (MART) and a single‑core START runtime targeting ARM, x86 and RISC‑V (extensa) to replace many executive duties and provide memory‑safe management; the language and runtime are planned for open source unless a larger project (TheDew) ships first.
AI-written summary · about
related talks
27mProtecting Data In-Use from Firmware and Physical Attacks
30mProactive Software Defense against Side Channel Attacks
40mKeeping secrets in your opponent's hands
06mLightning Talk: Security Down to the Kernel
23mHardware security for critical national infrastructure
44mBehind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security
49mBreaking Hardware-Enforced Security With Hypervisors
10mKeynote: Innovation Secured: A Paradigm Shift in the Processor Industry