UPDATED 01:23 EDT / AUGUST 24 2016

NEWS

Kaspersky launches hardened OS for industrial control systems

Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Labs has finally completed the development of its “unhackable” operating system after four years.

Kaspersky first announced it was working on the OS back in 2012, saying it would be built “from the ground up” and designed to protect key information for the world’s most critical industries, such as transportation control centers, telecommunication systems, nuclear power stations, and various other important installations.

The company followed up its announcement with a more detailed whitepaper on the OS outlining some of the criteria it deemed necessary to protect such systems.

The criteria stated that the OS could not be based on previously existing computer code, which meant it had to be written from scratch. In addition, the new OS must not contain any mistakes or vulnerabilities whatsoever in the kernel, the most fundamental part of any OS which controls all the other system modules. As such, the core would need to be 100 percent verified that it does not permit any vulnerabilities or dual-purpose code, the paper said. Finally, the paper stated that to make this happen, the kernel itself would need the absolute bare minimum of code, which necessitates that the kernel would need to control the maximum possible amount of code, including any drivers, and execute them with low-level rights.

Kaspersky hasn’t made any announcements in English, but the Russian language news site Vedomosti.ru describes Kaspersky OS as a hardened operating system that enables process execution in industrial control systems and healthcare equipment.

Vedomosti says the OS is comparable with Cisco Systems Ltd.’s IOS and Huwai Technologies Co. Ltd.’s VRP operating systems. It adds that the Kaspersky OS has already been deployed in routers made by Russian networking firm Kraftway Technologies Corp., which has a substantial presence in that country’s industrial control systems market.

One last thing worth noting: From what we can glean from the Russian media reports, it seems Kaspersky is somewhat sensibly no longer using language like “unhackable” to describe its new OS.

That’s probably just as well, as most experts agree that creating one would be next to impossible. Even if there are no mistakes, that doesn’t mean there aren’t vulnerabilities. Flaws that haven’t even been thought of yet may still come out. Furthermore, since no router is an island, it may well be that someone works out how to compromise the OS, or systems running on it, at some point in the future.

That’s not to say it isn’t worth the effort of trying to build an “unhackable” OS — even if it can never be certain that the finished product is truly 100 percent secure.

Image credit: Bergadder via pixabay.com

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