There is a lot of research going on in this area, but I am not certain what the 
current state of development is at this time. I think that SE-Linux and Trusted 
Solaris is the most commercially viable at this time.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tracy R Reed" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Security, Reliability, and the OS
Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2005 14:54:02 -0800

> 
> I don't know if this will catch on or not but it is a very interesting
> project. The goal is to make an extremely reliable and provably secure
> operating system. I have not yet downloaded and played with it yet but
> they seem to have a very good start. The OS started out as KeyKOS:
> 
> http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/
> 
> Then came EROS:
> 
> http://www.eros-os.org/
> 
> And now they are working on Coyotos:
> 
> http://www.coyotos.org
> 
> There are really three remarkable things about this:
> 
> 1.  These are are capability based operating systems. This is a much
> better security model based on least privilidge than Unix uses. It is
> designed such that side effects (buffer overflows) can be logically ruled
> out, code proven, and a trusted computing base can be established.
> 
> 2. They are creating a new language (I know, I hate it when people do
> this, but they may have a good reason in this case) with stricly
> formalized semantics to allow provable code which should result in far
> fewer defects than any previous systems programming language.
> 
> 3. KeyKOS and EROS were "persistant" operating systems. They have removed
> this feature from Coyote but I am hoping they put it back. This means that
> memory is really just a cache for disk and the whole thing is treated as
> one big address space which has synchronization points and a form of
> journalling. This means the entire state of the system is regularly saved
> to disk and if the system crashes you can resume from where you left off.
> It is similar to hibernation for laptops except it is happening all the
> time so if you just pull the power or the system crashes you don't lose
> all of your work. You could theoretically save the system, pull the drive,
> put it into a different (perhaps upgraded or repaired or backup system)
> and pick up where you left off.
> 
> I love the story in the link below about their little competition with
> Novell.
> 
> Here is a more detailed explanation:
> 
> http://www.eros-os.org/project/novelty.html
> 
> --
> Tracy Reed
> http://ultraviolet.org
> This message is cryptographically signed for your protection.
> Info: http://copilotconsulting.com/sig
> --
> 
> KPLUG-List mailing list
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