Google Announces KataOS As Security-Focused OS, Leveraging Rust & seL4 Microkernel

guest · Oct 16, 2022

by Michael Larabel @michaellarabel - October 16, 2022

Google this week has announced the release of KataOS as their newest operating system effort focused on embedded devices running ambient machine learning workloads. KataOS is security-minded, exclusively uses the Rust programming language, and is built atop the seL4 microkernel as its foundation.

KataOS is intended for use with the ever-growing number of smart devices with a particular emphasis on embedded hardware running machine learning applications. Given the increasing industry focus of RISC-V, that CPU architecture is a primary support focus for KataOS. Google's Open-Source Blog announced:

[...] KataOS provides a verifiably-secure platform that protects the user's privacy because it is logically impossible for applications to breach the kernel's hardware security protections and the system components are verifiably secure. KataOS is also implemented almost entirely in Rust, which provides a strong starting point for software security, since it eliminates entire classes of bugs, such as off-by-one errors and buffer overflows.
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Learn more about this Google effort via their Open-Source Blog. KataOS code is being worked on via GitHub under the AmbiML umbrella.
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Google: Announcing KataOS and Sparrow

As we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by smart devices that collect and process information from their environment, it's more important now than ever that we have a simple solution to build verifiably secure systems for embedded hardware. If the devices around us can't be mathematically proven to keep data secure, then the personally-identifiable data they collect—such as images of people and recordings of their voices—could be accessible to malicious software.
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Unfortunately, system security is often treated as a software feature that can be added to existing systems or solved with an extra piece of ASIC hardware— this generally is not good enough. Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.

As the foundation for this new operating system, we chose seL4 as the microkernel because it puts security front and center; it is mathematically proven secure, with guaranteed confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
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To prove-out a secure ambient system in its entirety, we're also building a reference implementation for KataOS called Sparrow, which combines KataOS with a secured hardware platform. So in addition to the logically-secure operating system kernel, Sparrow includes a logically-secure root of trust built with OpenTitan on a RISC-V architecture. However, for our initial release, we're targeting a more standard 64-bit ARM platform running in simulation with QEMU.
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Google Announces KataOS As Security-Focused OS, Leveraging Rust & seL4 Microkernel

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