Leaving legacy behind
Is the way we run services these days sustainable? The trusted computing base -- the lines of code where, if a flaw is discovered, jeopardizes the security and integrity of the entire service -- is enormous. Using orchestration systems that contain millions of lines of code, and that execute shell code, does not decrease this. This talk will present an alternative, minimalist approach to secure network services - relying on a programming language that guarantees memory safety - composing small libraries (open source, permissively licensed) to build so-called MirageOS unikernels -- special purpose services. Besides web services, other digital infrastructure such as VPN gateway, calendar server, DNS server and resolver, and a minimalistic orchestration system, will be presented. Each unikernel can either run as virtual machine (KVM, Xen, BHyve, virtio), as a sandboxed process (with seccomp filters allowing only 8 system calls), or in smaller containments (GenodeOS, muen separation kernel) -- even a prototypical ESP32 backend is available.