The intellectual property generated by the Nicta research will be handed over to Open Kernel Labs, a Nicta spinoff firm, for further development. The research took four years, and was conducted by 12 Nicta researchers, in conjunction with the University of New South Wales.

Nicta claimed that many kinds of attack,timberland mens boots, such as those exploiting buffer-overflow vulnerabilities, would not be successful against the seL4 microkernel.

Australia’s Information and Communications Technology Centre of Excellence (Nicta),cheap mbt shoes chapa, a private-sector research organization, this week announced the completion of the first formal machine-checked proof of a general-purpose operating-system kernel. The kernel is called the secure embedded L4 (seL4) microkernel.

Tom Espiner of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Researchers prove kernel is secure

Australian researchers have demonstrated a way to prove core software for mission-critical systems is safe.

Paulson added that teams in Europe had also made breakthroughs in the formal verification of computer systems, giving the German Verisoft project as an example.

“Formal proofs for specific properties have been conducted for smaller kernels, but what we have done is a general, functional correctness proof which has never before been achieved for real-world, high-performance software of this complexity,” said Klein.

Lawrence Paulson, professor of computational logic at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory, who developed the Isabelle generic proof assistant Nicta modified to check its kernel, told ZDNet UK that the microkernel breakthrough would have a trickle-down effect for businesses.

The researchers this week said they can prove mathematically that code they have developed, designed to govern the safety and security of systems in aircraft and motor vehicles, is free of many classes of error.

While rigorously testing high-quality code is expensive, said Paulson, developing such tests and operating systems for specialized purposes would have the secondary effect of improving software in general.

“I regard the software industry as a real mess,” Paulson said on Thursday. “If you’ve ever used a computer you know how unreliable they are. This is an important way of making it better.”