Towards Untrusted Device Drivers

Device drivers are well known to be one of the prime sources of unreliability in today’s computer systems. We argue that this need not be, as drivers can be run as user-level tasks, allowing them to be encapsulated by hardware protection. In contrast to prior work on user-level drivers, we show that on present hardware it is possible to prevent DMA from undermining this encapsulation. We show that this can be done without unreasonably impacting driver performance.

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