DARPA to Fund Open Source Security Research

divert writes "Just got an email on the SEC-PROG mailing list that DARPA is looking to fund security research for open source operating systems." Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.

Comments

OpenBSD is not a Trusted System

[Carnage4Life]

Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.

The DARPA program is called Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems (CHATS) which implies that they are interested in Trusted Systems not systems that claim to be secure because a bunch of hackers allegedly have fixed all the buffer overflows. Being "secure" and being a trusted system are completely different things.

Maybe micheal meant to mention TrustedBSD which is attempting to become certified as a Trusted System?

*BSD isn't research

[q000921]

Incrementally improving an existing system that, one way or another is perhaps more secure than the rest of the open source systems, isn't "research". Research is about inventing new principles and finding better ways of doing things.

Perhaps some of this research will be done on top of one of the BSD platforms. Perhaps it will be done on Linux. Perhaps some of it will be completely platform independent. But no matter what it will be done on, there are more interesting research questions to ask about open source, secure operating systems, and heterogeneous environments than whether we can fix a few more bugs in BSD or Linux.

A chance for a GUI OS come out of this?

[Bonker]

While the various *nix's and BSD's are most likely going to be the major targets of this research, what I'd really love to see come out of this is a new Open Source OS, ala BeOS, that was built on a GUI base and had shell functionality rather than the other way 'round. Not a lot of difference, you say? Sit Granny down in front of BeOS and and a shell prompt and see which one she prefers. Gnome and GTK are a little better, but to make any real changes to the OS, you still have to drop down to shell-level controls. As a graphic artist, this is bit of a dream of mine.... *sigh*... Of course, the problems here are that DARPA is going to be a lot more concerned with things like number-cruching, DB manipulation, and cryptography rather than pixel-pushing or artistic representation. There's also the fact that vast majority of developers who are even moderately going to be interested in this project are going to be *nix hackers. Artistic skill and coding skill are often found in hackers, but for some reason, you seldom see them combined.