Facing the Complexity: The Challenges of Adopting Microkernels for Cloud Infrastructure

The ongoing digitalization has made cloud services and data centers the backbone of significant parts of our modern society and economy. Thus, exposing more and more sensitive data to a plethora of novel threats, both in terms of security and safety. However, most of today's cloud infrastructure runs on monolithic system software that makes it hard to harden against security leaks or unwanted outages by relying on too coarse-grained capabilities or having to orchestrate multiple security enforcement systems simultaneously. Even worse, solutions meant to improve performance or mitigate interference from co-located workloads can increase security risks by weakening or circumventing OS security policies. With capabilities, modern microkernels offer fine-grained access control via a single enforcement mechanism, while moving system services to the user space mitigates the failure of individual services and prevents a total system failure. However, despite their advantages, microkernels have seen little adoption among cloud service providers. This talk will present the benefits of a cloud architecture based on a microkernel and discuss the challenges of building such an architecture on a modern microkernel through the example of a prototype based on the Genode Operating System Framework.