They set out to confirm a hunch that despite reducing attack surface by using stripped-down kernels, unikernel applications would be less secure than containerized applications because the unikernels would have relatively primitive runtime security, compared to Linux container systems which inherit two decades of countermeasure work.

They tested IncludeOS and Rumprun and found both to have approximately 1998-levels of runtime hardening. IncludeOS in particular was a steaming crater at the end; a stack overflow on IncludeOS could write directly into the (writeable!) program text, and the NULL page was writeable and executable.