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Secure64 Software Corporation is a software development company headquartered in Fort Collins, CO, USA, building server applications.
Secure64 was founded in 2002 and began full-scale development in 2005. Its founders include Bill Worley, CTO, a former chief scientist of Hewlett Packard and lead developer of PA-RISC and PA-WideWord technologies. Secure64 has filed for several patents. [1] [2] [3]
The SourceT Micro OS executes on standard Itanium server hardware, and provides the foundation for Secure64 software applications. Secure64 uses the term "micro OS" to describe SourceT, because, although it shares attributes of traditional microkernels and monolithic kernels, it does not fit the classical definition of either.
Like microkernels, SourceT adheres to the principles that minimal code should execute in kernel mode (currently less than 4,000 lines of code in SourceT), and that all applications and operating system services such as File system, device drivers and protocol stacks should not execute in kernel mode. However, like monolithic kernel architectures, SourceT's operating system services are accessed through system service calls rather than through interprocess communication with user-mode servers.
Unlike general-purpose operating systems, which are designed to execute on a wide variety of hardware platforms, SourceT was specifically designed to take advantage of some of the unique security and performance features of the Itanium microprocessor to create a high performance, highly secure architecture. These unique Itanium features include:
Secure64 has a patent pending for the queued, non-blocking and self-protecting communications architecture used by SourceT. Designed from the ground up with a queued, scalable architecture that differs significantly from a traditional Berkeley sockets architecture, the network stack accelerates network I/O performance and automatically detects and drops malformed or flooding packets, such as those received as the victim of a Denial-of-service attacks.
Secure64 DNS products are security-hardened commercial DNS appliances, deployed on a proprietary 64-bit operating system running on Intel Itanium hardware. Some of these products include:
In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC).
A monolithic kernel is an operating system architecture with the entire operating system running in kernel space. The monolithic model differs from other architectures such as the microkernel in that it alone defines a high-level virtual interface over computer hardware. A set of primitives or system calls implement all operating system services such as process management, concurrency, and memory management.
Mach is a kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Richard Rashid and Avie Tevanian to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computing. Mach is often considered one of the earliest examples of a microkernel. However, not all versions of Mach are microkernels. Mach's derivatives are the basis of the operating system kernel in GNU Hurd and of Apple's XNU kernel used in macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, telecommunications operators, network information services, and industrial manufacturers. During the 1990s and 2000s, there were approximately half a million VMS systems in operation worldwide.
HP-UX is Hewlett Packard Enterprise's proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system, based on Unix System V and first released in 1984. Current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architecture.
The trusted computing base (TCB) of a computer system is the set of all hardware, firmware, and/or software components that are critical to its security, in the sense that bugs or vulnerabilities occurring inside the TCB might jeopardize the security properties of the entire system. By contrast, parts of a computer system that lie outside the TCB must not be able to misbehave in a way that would leak any more privileges than are granted to them in accordance to the system's security policy.
An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is embedded as part of a complete device often including electrical or electronic hardware and mechanical parts. Because an embedded system typically controls physical operations of the machine that it is embedded within, it often has real-time computing constraints. Embedded systems control many devices in common use. In 2009, it was estimated that ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors manufactured were used in embedded systems.
IA-64 is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented by Intel in collaboration with HP. The first Itanium processor, codenamed Merced, was released in 2001.
L4 is a family of second-generation microkernels, used to implement a variety of types of operating systems (OS), though mostly for Unix-like, Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant types.
Xen is a free and open-source type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and is now being developed by the Linux Foundation with support from Intel, Citrix, Arm Ltd, Huawei, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, AMD, Bitdefender and epam.
XNU is the computer operating system (OS) kernel developed at Apple Inc. since December 1996 for use in the Mac OS X operating system and released as free and open-source software as part of the Darwin OS, which, in addition to being the basis for macOS, is also the basis for Apple TV Software, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, visionOS, and tvOS.
K42 is a discontinued open-source research operating system (OS) for cache-coherent 64-bit multiprocessor systems. It was developed primarily at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in collaboration with the University of Toronto and University of New Mexico. The main focus of this OS is to address performance and scalability issues of system software on large-scale, shared memory, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) multiprocessing computers.
The architecture of Windows NT, a line of operating systems produced and sold by Microsoft, is a layered design that consists of two main components, user mode and kernel mode. It is a preemptive, reentrant multitasking operating system, which has been designed to work with uniprocessor and symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP)-based computers. To process input/output (I/O) requests, it uses packet-driven I/O, which utilizes I/O request packets (IRPs) and asynchronous I/O. Starting with Windows XP, Microsoft began making 64-bit versions of Windows available; before this, there were only 32-bit versions of these operating systems.
In computer science, hierarchical protection domains, often called protection rings, are mechanisms to protect data and functionality from faults and malicious behavior.
A hybrid kernel is an operating system kernel architecture that attempts to combine aspects and benefits of microkernel and monolithic kernel architectures used in operating systems.
Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which was released on July 27, 1993, and it lives on today, as the latest version of Windows, 11, includes its technology.
The kernel is a computer program at the core of a computer's operating system and generally has complete control over everything in the system. The kernel is also responsible for preventing and mitigating conflicts between different processes. It is the portion of the operating system code that is always resident in memory and facilitates interactions between hardware and software components. A full kernel controls all hardware resources via device drivers, arbitrates conflicts between processes concerning such resources, and optimizes the utilization of common resources e.g. CPU & cache usage, file systems, and network sockets. On most systems, the kernel is one of the first programs loaded on startup. It handles the rest of startup as well as memory, peripherals, and input/output (I/O) requests from software, translating them into data-processing instructions for the central processing unit.
Galileo was an unreleased 32-bit operating system that was under development by Acorn Computers as a long-term project to produce "an ultra-modern scalable, portable, multi-tasking, multi-threading, object-oriented, microkernel operating system", reportedly significant enough to Acorn's strategy to warrant a statement to the financial markets.
Bare Machine Computing (BMC) is a computer architecture based on bare machines. In the BMC paradigm, applications run without the support of any operating system (OS) or centralized kernel i.e., no intermediary software is loaded on the bare machine prior to running applications. The applications, which are called bare machine applications or simply BMC applications, do not use any persistent storage or a hard disk, and instead are stored on detachable mass storage such as a USB flash drive. A BMC program consists of a single application or a small set of applications that runs as a single executable within one address space. BMC applications have direct access to the necessary hardware resources. They are self-contained, self-managed and self-controlled entities that boot, load and run without using any other software components or external software. BMC applications have inherent security due to their design. There are no OS-related vulnerabilities, and each application only contains the necessary (minimal) functionality. There is no privileged mode in a BMC system since applications only run in user mode. Also, application code is statically compiled-there is no means to dynamically alter BMC program flow during execution.
