FLAWS in the code, or "kernel", that sits at the heart of modern computers leave them prone to occasional malfunction and vulnerable to attack by worms and viruses. So the development of a secure general-purpose microkernel could pave the way for reliable computing for us all.

The microkernel, dubbed seL4, is the work of technology research company NICTA and the University of New South Wales in Australia and Open Kernel Labs. Their kernel has been pared down to the minimum amount of code needed to link the computer hardware to the applications that run on it.

The team behind seL4 have proved in principle that it is possible to create secure computer code that will run on any system that requires guaranteed security and reliability.

Previous efforts to design code that is free of bugs and immune to malicious attack has produced kernels that were either restricted ...

Courtesy Computer Crime