On 23 Jun 2022, at 05:13, Isaac Beckett 
<isaactbeck...@gmail.com<mailto:isaactbeck...@gmail.com>> wrote:

Hello, in your answer about camkes VMs, you mentioned a collaboration with 
DARPA on their SMACCM/HACMS project.

While seL4 is undoubtedly a good choice for mixed criticality systems like 
avionics on a UAV, I’m somewhat frustrated to hear y’all had done a contract 
for DARPA considering what they *use* those drones to do.

Is there somewhere I can read more in detail about this and other 
military-adjacent contracts?

In terms of technical content: https://trustworthy.systems/projects/TS/SMACCM/

We (the people who worked on these projects from the TS side) had the policy to 
accept and look for funding for work that is open source, including from 
defence. (In fact without that DARPA funding, it's unlikely that seL4 would be 
available open source now or have a community around it). We're not US citizens 
so can't work on US classified projects, which was a reasonable barrier for 
what kind of use we directly supported.  (I'm using past tense here, because 
the community is now much larger and more diverse, and I don't know what other 
groups and companies do)

Of course all open source software can indirectly support anything. Pretty sure 
militaries around the world use a lot more Linux, BSD, networking stacks, 
encryption stacks, etc than they use seL4.

Personally, even for weapons systems, and even though I do not intend to work 
on any myself, I'd rather people have a dangerous weapons system that works as 
intended than one that has software bugs and uncontrolled behaviour. I'm not 
going to build such a system, but I'm fine accepting funding for work that 
makes everyone more able to build safer or more secure systems.

Cheers,
Gerwin

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