Unikernels and Attack Surface Reduction: An Empirical and Architectural Evaluation of MirageOS Against General-Purpose Baseline Operating

Abstract

Traditional monolithic operating systems, such as Windows 10, present significant architectural challenges in cloud and microservice environments due to their expansive attack surfaces, high resource footprints, and continuous baseline energy consumption. This paper delivers a comprehensive empirical comparative evaluation between a general-purpose monolithic baseline (Windows 10 Enterprise) and a type-safe library operating system paradigm (MirageOS Unikernel compiled on the Solo5-hvt micro-sandbox). Both environments were evaluated on a uniform Intel Core i7 hardware platform with 6GB RAM across three architectural dimensions: network security exposure, performance latency, and green computing sustainability. Network auditing via Nmap stealth scanning demonstrated a  attack surface reduction, as MirageOS successfully eliminated all baseline listening sockets (0 open ports) compared to over 14 exposed ports in Windows 10. Furthermore, the specialized unikernel architecture achieved an estimated  reduction in baseline memory footprint, shrinking requirements from 2.5GB to merely , alongside sub-millisecond boot latencies. Energy profiling validated that the removal of background system daemons cuts idle CPU power draw from

These findings demonstrate that while monolithic architectures remain essential for general-purpose user tasks, MirageOS establishes a highly secure, ultra-lean, and ecologically sustainable deployment framework optimal for next-generation cloud infrastructure.