A Linux-compatible Library OS for Multi-Process Applications
Graphene is a lightweight guest OS, designed to run a single application with minimal host requirements. Graphene can run applications in an isolated environment with benefits comparable to running a complete OS in a virtual machine -- including guest customization, ease of porting to different OSes, and process migration.
Graphene supports native, unmodified Linux applications on any platform. Currently, Graphene runs on Linux and Intel SGX enclaves on Linux platforms.
With Intel SGX support, Graphene can secure a critical application in a hardware-encrypted memory region. Graphene can protect applications from a malicious system stack with minimal porting effort.
Our papers describe the motivation, design choices, and measured performance of Graphene:
Graphene is at a point where it is functionally ready for testing and development, but there are some known security issues that require more attention. The effort to review and harden security of Graphene is ongoing. Our roadmap is to address the remaining production blockers roughly by the fall of 2021. Of course, with additional help from the community, we can meet these milestones sooner!
The most important problems (which include major security issues) are tracked in #1544 (Production blockers). You should read it before installing and using Graphene.
The latest version of Graphene can be cloned from GitHub:
git clone https://github.com/oscarlab/graphene.gitAt this time Graphene is available only as source code. Building instructions are available.
Graphene library OS uses pal_loader utility as a loader to bootstrap
applications in the library OS:
[PATH TO Runtime]/pal_loader [APPLICATION] [ARGUMENTS]...
(Manifest file: "[APPLICATION].manifest")Running an application requires some minimal configuration in the application's
manifest file. A sensible manifest file will include paths to the library
OS and other libraries the application requires; environment variables, such as
LD_LIBRARY_PATH; and file systems to be mounted.
Here is an example manifest file:
loader.preload = "file:LibOS/shim/src/libsysdb.so"
loader.env.LD_LIBRAY_PATH = "/lib"
fs.mount.libc.type = "chroot"
fs.mount.libc.path = "/lib"
fs.mount.libc.uri = "file:[relative path to Graphene root]/Runtime"More examples can be found in the test directories (LibOS/shim/test). We
have also tested several applications, such as GCC, Bash, and Apache.
The manifest files for these applications are provided in the
individual directories under Examples.
For the full documentation of the Graphene manifest syntax, see the Graphene documentation.
Applications deployed as Docker images may be graphenized via the gsc tool.
For the full documentation of the Graphene, see the Graphene documentation.
For any questions, please send an email to [email protected] (public archive).
For bug reports, post an issue on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/oscarlab/graphene/issues.
We have some branches with legacy code (use at your own risk).
This feature is marked as EXPERIMENTAL and no longer exists in the master branch. See EXPERIMENTAL/linux-reference-monitor.