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seL4 is "The world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement" originally developed (as far as I know) at UNSW, further developed at NICTA.

The original project home page is at http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/projects/seL4/ and the new page is at http://sel4.systems/

Downloads at http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/software/TS/seL4/



This is excellent. While I'm still unsure about the seL4 model being the best for a secure system (a topic for another day), it's wonderful to see this development.

I hope "someone" will port this to RISC-V (32- or 64-bit).

Is http://ssrg.nicta.com.au/software/TS/seL4 out of date or is the license really not open source (OPEN KERNEL LABS and National ICT Australia Limited (Licensors) NON-COMMERCIAL LICENSE AGREEMENT)?


I think the OP was trying to point out that it officially got open-sourced today.

From http://sel4.systems/ :

"General Dynamics C4 Systems and NICTA are pleased to announce the open sourcing of seL4, the world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement. It is still the world's most highly-assured OS.

What's being released?

It includes all of the kernel's source code, all the proofs, plus other code and proofs useful for building highly trustworthy systems. All is under standard open-source licensing terms — either GPL version 2, or the 2-clause BSD licence.

When is it happening?

The release happened at noon of Tuesday, 29 July 2014 AEST (UTC+10), in celebration of International Proof Day (the fifth aniversary of the completion of seL4's functional correctness proof)."

EDIT: The original link should probably be updated to http://sel4.systems/ as it has the link to the Github page prominently displayed there.


Just found a great summary about what is proved to be secure and what is assumed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8100033


Can you explain why you are unsure the seL4 model is the best for a secure system?


I guess today _is_ another day.

The fundamental issue is that, IMhO, security classification needs to be attached to the data at the lowest level -- OS level is simply to coarse. Take for example an encrypted channel. At the OS level the channel is treated opaquely whereas at the programming language level, after decryption the authenticated data can be assigned both a different level of secrecy and trust, and it can be data dependent. Strong type systems can ensure that secret data is never accidentally leaked, nor untrusted data used in a trusted context. (For a real-life simple subset of this, see tperl).

It may be possible to build such a system on top of seL4, but seL4 isn't sufficient.

I do intend on working on this eventually. Incidentally, D. J. Bernstein recently shared a similar complaint about the state of security - the models we use have practically not advanced since the 1950es.


You should have a look at the literature on capability security, especially http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/duals/myths.html

There was hardly any computer security in the 1950s: it was before time sharing and networking. Your cynicism is over-done.


It is out of date. The most of kernel is under GPLv2.


Thanks, the given link couldn't have contained less information if it tried


The FAQ[1] has a hell of a lot of info about what seL4 does and does not do.

[1] http://sel4.systems/FAQ


Which is not referenced from the linked article. What is the point of posting something with all but no information?


They should have submitted http://sel4.systems/ as the link, instead of the github link.


I'm not sure who submitted the link (I don't think it was anyone from the seL4 team), but I inserted the http://sel4.systems/ link into the repo's README file, which will hopefully help a little.


Oh, I didn't realise the linked article wasn't the actual seL4 website.


Maybe this is a bad place to ask, but why the virtualization requirement for running Linux on top? Is there for security reasons?

There are (have been?) other L4/Linux projects and they didn't require this.


Something about L4 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family

I hadn't heard about it before


The paper they published based on their findings, "Improving IPC by kernel design"[0], is pretty #cool and worth reading.

[0] http://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/sched/readings/l3.pdf




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