Need for an open-source mainstream capability-based OS

Sander Temme wrote:

This situation paints for me the following picture: a tap is running, malware flowing like water into a sieve and onto the floor. The security industry is frantically mopping the floor, trying to stem the flow of malware. They are paid well for their trouble, but meanwhile the expensive rug that represents your business is getting awfully wet. It would be nice if someone could turn off the tap, or design an operating system that doesn’t leak like a sieve

Barrelfish?

A secure OS gotta be capability based.
It's gotta be peformant on multi-cpu boxes.
Barrelfish might be both.

Warning: capability based OS can be really restrictive.
It can be very non free (RMS will hate it).

Remote attestation peformed by a TMP chip is the issue.

BIOS tells the TPM chip the hashcode of the OS. The OS tells the chip the hashcode of your movie player. TPM chip signs the hashcode with a secret key. An MPAA member checks the signature against a database of all TPMs ever produced. If satisfied it provides you with a personal copy of a movie. To watch the movie you need a one-off key. This key is given to you. But the key is itself encrypted. Only your TPM can decrypt it. And your TPM will only decrypt it if correct hash-sums have been provided to it after the last machine restart. Unless BIOS has been broken a 3rd party can really verify what software you're running!

The only reason this is not happening now is that a myriad of drivers are running in kernel mode. It is not possible to check that your particular combination of drivers + OS comply with MPAA requirements.

But with a capability based OS there would be a very small OS core.
And it would be possible to sign it.
The 3rd parties would be able to check that it hasn't been hacked or deny useful services.
The TMP chips would lock us from our own computers!
We would no longer have the freedom to hack, the freedom to know.

Solution?

Programmers of good will should create a practical capability based OS
before commercial vendors do. They should make it so popular that nobody in
a right mind would want to repalce it with a commercial alternative.

And it should be both secure and free.
Free as in GPL v3.
Free as in free to hack.

Both secure and free to hack. That's a challenge. More on this later.