A Myth That Won’t Die

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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.