APRON: Authenticated and Progressive System Image Renovation

Explore a conference talk on APRON, an innovative scheme for secure and progressive renovation of corrupt or outdated operating system images. Learn about the importance of integrity and availability in computing devices, and how APRON addresses the overlooked issue of efficient recovery from system corruption. Discover how this approach minimizes system downtime by concurrently and selectively repairing invalid blocks on demand during and after system boot. Understand the mechanism of verifying block validity using a signed Merkle hash tree, fetching and replacing invalid blocks from reliable sources, and the background thread that completes the renovation process. Examine the performance benefits of APRON, including its ability to outperform conventional recovery mechanisms by up to 28x and its minimal runtime overhead for real-world applications.

USENIX ATC '23 - APRON: Authenticated and Progressive System Image Renovation