Malicious Process Conscious Operating Systems (MPCOS)
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Date
2008-10
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Additional principle of operating system is presented in this paper towards making the
operating system malicious activity conscious. In addition to the existing principles of
modern operating systems that mainly focus on resource management and user
management, we proposed operating systems should follow principles of preventing
malicious code. Exploiting the fact that malicious code/programs still require services
from the operating system that is provided via system call, we hypothesized and
demonstrated that the operating system is the ideal location where malicious code
prevention is made. Since computer security has a human element as well, in our
approach we followed control of malicious activity by forcing them to run with the
consent of the user. We also suggested a mechanism of pre-evaluation of programs to
categories them as trusted or not. The suggested mechanism uses a lookup file called
TALF which consist list of known or trusted application. The operating system thereby
consults the TALF prior to letting any application run on the machine. Each application
in the TALF is identified by a locally unique identifier – TAID. In line with TALF, an
alert system is proposed to bring program execution to the consent of the user.
Description
Keywords
Conscious; Operating; Systems