Archive for the 'Computer Science' Category

“TPM DRM” In Mac OS X

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

A Myth That Won’t Die

IBM Assured Execution Environment

Saturday, June 23rd, 2007

Several years ago, while I was working at the IBM Almaden Research Center, we came up with a security mechanism called the Assured Execution Environment (AxE). We had implementations for Windows XP and Mac OS X. (Although AxE supports code signing as a feature, it’s not the same—in any case, this was long before code [...]

Process Photography on Mac OS X

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

Details on taking a snapshot of the memory and register state of a running process on Mac OS X, including source for a user-space program that does that.

Public Talk on MacFUSE @ Google

Thursday, May 10th, 2007

People are welcome to join us at Google on Thursday, May 24, for an open-to-public talk on all things MacFUSE. I’m told that “Doors open at 6:30PM at Google’s Mountain View campus. Guests should plan to sign in at Building 41 reception upon arrival. Refreshments will be served…”
Here’s an abstract:

File systems provide one of the [...]

procfs for Mac OS X

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

I’ve made available a MacFUSE-Based process file system for Mac OS X. Source code is included.

Macworld 2007, File Systems Talk, and MacFUSE

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

I gave a talk titled “Taming Mac OS X File Systems” at Macworld 2007 today. I also announced Google’s open source release of MacFUSE. Here are some relevant links:

The MacFUSE Page on Google Code
List of Wiki Articles on the Project Page
Slides from the Talk

Besides internal tech demos that I demonstrated during the talk, I’ve tested [...]

Trusted Computing for Mac OS X

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

Read about how to enable trusted computing on Mac OS X. The document’s coverage includes:

A discussion of the TPM hardware present in certain Macintosh computers
Release of an open source TPM driver for Mac OS X
Release of a Mac OS X port of an open source trusted computing software stack
An overview of using the driver and [...]

New Version of HFSDebug

Saturday, May 27th, 2006

I have released a new version (2.5) of hfsdebug. The new version fixes a bug in the calculation of free space blocks on a volume, and now all features are supported on both the PowerPC and x86 versions of Mac OS X. In particular, hfsdebug no longer uses the /dev/kmem device for displaying kernel-memory-resident mount [...]

BAMBIOS: Legacy (BIOS-Based) Booting on the Intel-Based Macintosh

Monday, March 13th, 2006

We have developed software (”BAMBIOS”) that allows such legacy booting on the Intel-based Macintoshes. For example, a regular (that is, non-EFI) version of Linux can be readily booted using this software.
A mini presentation on the design of BAMBIOS is available.

Updates

Friday, October 28th, 2005

My apologies to all who have sent me emails that I couldn’t respond to — I am almost entirely off email for over a month.
I hope to be able to say “done” in a matter of days now, if you know what I’m talking about.
I know the motion sensor software doesn’t work on Mac OS [...]

UNIX on the Nintendo Game Boy Advance

Tuesday, September 7th, 2004

gbaunix is a rather contrived experiment in which we run an ancient version of the UNIX operating system on a popular hand-held game system using a simulator. Specifically, it is 5th edition UNIX (1974) running on Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, with SIMH as the core simulator.

A Taste of Computer Security

Wednesday, July 28th, 2004

Given the nature and scope of the field of Computer Security, it would require one or more books to even briefly touch upon all that is known in the area. A Taste of Computer Security gives you, well, a taste of (a subset of) the subject. The contents are not uniform in their depth or [...]

An Introduction to Virtualization

Sunday, February 1st, 2004

I finally got around to putting together some random notes on virtualization, virtual machines, etc. into a document (An Introduction to Virtualization). It might be useful as a starting point for doing stuff in this area.


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