Autumn Meeting in Erlangen

Security, Isolation, and Trust in Modern Operating Systems

In light of increasingly complex hardware and software platforms, new attack surfaces in cloud, edge, and IoT environments, and growing demands for trustworthy data processing, operating system security continues to gain importance. Current developments such as confidential computing, hardware-supported isolation mechanisms, and the prevention of side-channel attacks highlight the central role of operating systems in protecting modern IT infrastructures. At the same time, new architectures, programming languages, and verification approaches raise the question of how operating systems can be designed, implemented, and operated more securely in the future.

The autumn meeting of the Operating Systems Special Interest Group therefore provides a forum for discussing current challenges, solution approaches, and research perspectives in operating system security. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Secure operating system architectures: microkernels, modular architectures, and approaches for minimizing the trusted computing base.
• Hardening of operating system kernels: protection against kernel exploits, privilege escalation, and unsafe system calls.
• Memory safety in operating systems: use of and migration to safe programming languages, formal verification of system interfaces, drivers, and operating system components.
• Isolation mechanisms: process isolation, sandboxing, containers, virtual machines, and protection between tenants.
• Access control and privilege separation: least privilege, zero trust, capabilities, mandatory access control, and secure rights management.
• Protection against side-channel attacks: prevention of attacks via caches and other shared hardware resources.
• Secure system initialization and system integrity: secure/measured boot, TPM-based attestation, and dynamic integrity checking.
• Confidential computing and trusted execution environments: system support for TEEs, confidential virtual machines, sealing, and attestation.

We also warmly welcome talk proposals outside the main focus of the event.

Submissions may either take the form of a one-page abstract (talk only) or a 2–6 page unpublished paper in ACM conference style, in German or English. All submissions will be reviewed by a program committee composed of members of the working group's leadership. Accepted papers (2–6 pages) will be published in the digital library of the Gesellschaft für Informatik.

Talks in English are explicitly encouraged. To facilitate participation for non-German-speaking members, the presentation language will be indicated in the final program.

Rüdiger Kapitza und Peter Wägemann (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)