An Architectural Approach for Cost Effective Trustworthy Systems

We describe a research program on design techniques to enable the cost-effective construction of trustworthy systems. The focus is on single-machine systems that can be formally verified to provide desired system-wide security and safety properties. Such systems are designed as compositions of small trusted components and large untrusted components whose behaviour is constrained by an underlying formally verified OS kernel. Past work has shown that building these systems is possible, now we wish to do so in a cost effective way. A key part of doing this is to design, as early as possible, an architecture that can provide the required trustworthiness properties. The research program envisions methods, models, analyses, and patterns to create and formally analyse such architectures. We present initial work on this program and discuss the gaps and research questions that will shape future research.