TECH TITANS: The kernel's secret recipe

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Gernot Heiser is well known in the circles he moves in, but outside that world neither he, nor the technology he's made his mark in, would be particularly recognisable.

And he's made quite a mark. Last week, Engineers Australia announced that Heiser had made its annual top 100 list, which also includes NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley, BHP chief executive Marius Kloppers and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet. Not bad company.

The technology that Heiser has mastered and caught the attention of the Engineers Australia is a simple form of software that allows an operating system to function. It's called a microkernel.

That might sound mundane. But when you consider that Heiser co-developed something called the OKL4 microkernel which has been shipped in 1.2 billion phones around the world and the use of microkernels is seen as a useful way of protecting anything from mobiles to defence departments, suddenly mundane doesn't seem like an appropriate word.

Backing up a bit, a kernel is a bridge between the applications on your computer, mobile or tablet and the hardware of those devices. They are the key component of an operating system.

The operating systems we're used to are Windows, Apple OS and Linux. But these systems are terribly complex with millions of lines of code. Bugs creep into them compromising efficiency, usability and ultimately security.

While Apple and Linux are seen as superior to Windows when it comes to most, if not all, of those factors when you really want security, simplicity is the key. Enter Heiser, founder of Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) and National ICT Australia (NICTA) research group leader.

 “Anything that's that big is definitely full of bugs, there's nothing we can do about it,” Heiser told Technology Spectator.

“The idea of a microkernel is to reduce the dangerous bits to a bare minimum and therefore have a much higher likelihood of getting it right.”

Heiser says a classic security issue that microkernels can address is a buffer overflow. Attackers can exploit often very subtle bugs in an operating system to overrun space in a storage buffer. From there they have the capacity to inject arbitrary code into the kernel and seize control of a system.

“In our system that's provably impossible,” Heiser says quite simply.

But microkernels don't always work exclusively from traditional operating system kernels, often they work in concert with them.

One example is the interaction between a mobile device and a company server, a particularly pertinent issue for businesses everywhere with employees increasingly keen to bring their devices to work and bring their work home via their devices.

It's possible for a microkernel to work underneath the operating system of your mobile so that interactions with a remote server can be protected from all manner of insidious apps.

To underline the importance of this technology, when asked about where the most interest in his research comes from, he immediately answers the Australian and US defence establishments.

The oddity about this technology is its simplicity – at least to those well versed in the language of computers – and the long wait for its adoption.

The basic idea of a microkernel dates back to the 1970s and research departments around the world began building them throughout the 80s.

“Most of them were unsuitable for supporting real systems,” says Heiser. “They were too slow and it took another ten years of research to come up with designs that actually did work and then another ten years or so to make them useable in practice.”

Now they are usable in practice and it's entirely likely that the next phone you pick up will have a little bit of Heiser looking back at you.