Abstract

At the heart of a secure software system is a small, trustworthy component, called the Trusted Computing Base (TCB). However, developers persist in building monolithic systems that force their users to trust the entire system. We posit that this is due to the lack of a straightforward mechanism of partitioning – or disaggregating – systems into trusted and untrusted components. We propose to use dynamic libraries as the unit of disaggregation, because these are a familiar abstraction, which is commonly used in mainstream software development.

In this talklet, I will describe some early ideas about our “disaggregated library” approach, which can be applied to existing applications the run on commodity operating systems. I will present the high-level motivation for this work, and our ideas for how to implement it.