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That's beat all for this week!
We all know how bad Multics was and so Unix was created. From that point history has been written:
- Unix is the white knight....mac OS ...embedded linux
- Microsoft windows/dos/PC is the dark side
- Multics? dead and buried.. never again.
So, imagine my surprise, while checking some older MIT stuff from AD (Andre Dehon) I came across the Multics Reunion MIT 2014 with a paper of AD.
Abstract: At a time when computers are increasingly involved in all aspects of our lives, our computer systems are too easily broken or subverted. The current state of affairs is, no doubt, unsurprising to Multicians who are painfully aware of the design and security compromises that went into the base design of today's mainstream systems. The past 30 years has also brought vast changes in the availability and costs of computer hardware as well as significant advances in formal methods. How do we exploit these advances to make computer systems worthy of the trust we are now placing in them? We specifically take a clean-slate approach to computer architectures and system designs based on modern costs and threats. We spend now cheap hardware to reduce or eliminate traditional security-performance tradeoffs and to provide stronger hardware safety and security interlocks that prevent gross security and safety violations even when there are bugs in the code. We embrace well-known security principles of least and separate privileges and complete mediation of operations. Our system revisits many pioneering Multics concepts including gates between software components with different-privileges, small and verified system components, and formal information flow properties and guarantees.
Project paper: http://www.crash-safe.org
Ten years ago he was fighting for the replacement of silicon platforms by {bio? to be checked}. And asked about the prospect, he rightly said that he was an academic and would not dare fighting the semiconductor industry...
Is there a lesson to learn? Obviously, cutting corners and bowing to economics pressure will bite you in the long run. Was Multics the answer to hacking? I have my doubts (but deep interest in this kind of rhetorical questions).
And I cannot not leave without mentioning Andre Dehon bio
Andre DeHon received S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990, 1993, and 1996 respectively. From 1996 to 1999, Andre co-ran the BRASS group in the Computer Science Department at the University of California at Berkeley. From 1999 to 2006, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology.
In 2006 he joined the Electrical and Systems Engineering Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is now a Full Professor. He is broadly interested in how we physically implement computations from substrates, including VLSI and molecular electronics, up through architecture, CAD, and programming models.
He places special emphasis on spatial programmable architectures (e.g. FPGAs) and interconnect design and optimization.
Multics BIO: Andre DeHon is a bastard child of the tail end of LISP Machine and Multics eras, having been a research assistant for Knight and a teaching assistant for Saltzer. As a member of MIT's Student Information Processing Board (SIPB), he was part of the group that pushed Multics access to MIT students and was logged in during the decommissioning of MIT-Multics. So, while he never contributed to Multics, he was around in time to learn that there were computer systems that predated Unix and Windows and that did have a principled way to address safety and security. He hopes the world is now ready for many of the Multics and LISPM ideas that were ahead of their time and have mostly been forgotten during the dark ages of mainstream Internet growth.
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