This paper highlights the weaknesses of existing security measures when confronted with an advanced rootkit design that exploits hardware-features for concealment and operation. It advocates comprehensive non-generic checks to detect and neutralize such threats.

This paper catalogs several techniques that improve the reliability of an operating system by providing it with the opportunity to heal itself after the occurrence of an error. In particular, we discuss exception handling, code reloading, operating system component isolation, micro-rebooting, automatic system service restarts, watchdog timer based recovery and transactional components.

This paper provides the foundation for my thesis research. It illustrates the serious impediment to restart-based recovery caused by state information in microkernel services. Our solution carefully restructures and manages this state information in order to prevent loss due to restarts in addition to dramatically reducing both inter-component and intra-component error propagation.

In this paper, we investigate the unique problem of lockups that occur within an operating system kernel and outline several solutions that recover the kernel from such situations.