Talk:OSC:File Systems

From SOFTICE

1 Notes on Setting up the lab
2 Going a little further

Notes on Setting up the lab

For this lab, we provide our students with a virtual device meant to be used as a DOS partition.

 dd if=/dev/zero of=vfat-disk.rfs seek=$[1024 * 10] count=1

You will then need to install the dosfstools pacakge

apt-get install dosfstools

in order to be able to format this device as a FAT partition for your students

mkfs -t vfat vfat-disk.rfs

You also need to make sure you have installed the sleuthkit debian package in the UML virtual disk image (this is done by default on the disk images you can download from softice).

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Going a little further

There are couple of ways this lab could be further developed;

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Rootkits

We already take care of exploring the security aspects of FS and more specifically the hiding of files and directories in OSC:Stealth Files.

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Stackable File Systems

Erez Zadok's work on stackable file systems (http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/research/fs/) is very promising for a lab. We can easily introduce a clean API as a first contact with the actual implementation of the VFS and have very morivating projects (encryption, spying, ...).

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FSFS: File Systems From Scratch

While I enjoyed digging in the FS layout in this lab, I still think that it's only the first part of a natural 2 parts lab. The second part will have to focus more on the VFS data structures in the kernel. Ben found the following link, might be a good start: