Designing a Self-Defending Operating System Architecture

Problem statement

Investigate an operating-system architecture that continuously evaluates security conditions, detects suspicious system changes, and applies controlled defensive responses.

Why it matters

Most defensive tooling observes an operating system from outside it, with limited visibility below the interface it consumes. A system that reasons about its own state could detect and contain changes faster, provided its responses remain bounded and auditable.

Research questions

1. 01 Which security events must the operating system collect to reason about its own state without overwhelming the system?
2. 02 What counts as a trusted baseline for critical components, and when may that baseline legitimately change?
3. 03 How should defensive policies be selected, applied and rolled back at runtime?
4. 04 What detection latency, false-positive rate and resource cost are acceptable for an automatic response?

Research objectives

• Define a security-event collection model.
• Establish trusted baselines for critical system components.
• Develop policy-based detection and response.
• Investigate tamper-evident security logs.
• Measure detection latency, false positives, and resource consumption.

Technical challenges

• Collection at kernel speed competes with the workloads the system is trying to protect.
• Baselines drift as software and configuration change, creating both false positives and blind spots.
• An automatic defensive response can itself become a denial-of-service vector if it is wrong.
• Tamper evidence depends on integrity guarantees that are themselves under investigation.

Expected outcome

A prototype defensive framework with an explicit threat model and reproducible evaluation results.

Tags

self-defending ossecurity eventstrusted baselinepolicy responsetamper-evident logs

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