User:Krik/SECOS

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Screenshot of SECOS loading

SECOS (SECure Operating System) was an operating system written by Thomas Ashworth and Ian Renton in 2000. It was originaly based on a Linux kernel, and was known as A&R Linux. A&R Linux was a private distro, never distributed outside of the two developers. It soon used its own kernel due to security and flexibility concerns and was renamed SECOS. It was primarly designed as a server operating system and had no graphical user interface, instead it used a text based menu iterfaces. It was for i586 based machines and required 16MB RAM and 100MB disk space.

1 Architecture
2 Kernel modules
3 The Challenge
4 The end of SECOS
5 Beyond SECOS
6 External link

[edit] Architecture

SECOS was DOS like in its design, but Linux like in other aspects. For security reasons SECOS could only be configured by creating a special kernel file, which must be "fused" with a kernel. This is done with "SECOS Workshop", a tool written in GTK for Linux. This made it harder to use, but made it more secure as you would need to reboot to configure, and there was no reboot function in the default kernel.

[edit] Kernel modules

SECOS has no applications like normal operating systems, its functioality is defined by so-called "SECOS Kernel Objects". (SKO). These extend the functionality as well as add hardware support. The default set of SKOs were.

Score. The core OS and drivers.
Sloader. Module loading system. Loads all other modules. Modules are defined in the kernel file.
Sui. The text ui system
Sfs. Support for SecosFS, FAT and ext2 file systems
Snet. TCP/IP stack, ethernet card support, Web server
Snet2. Extra networking extras
Sgames. Five fun games.

There were a total of 57 extra modules avalible, most notable ones include Neomouse, which allows control of the Windows 98 mouse control protocol on another machine for remote mouse control, plus Sinyx, which allowed text mode GNU/Linux programs to run (Glibc 2.0).

[edit] The Challenge

In June 2000 a man called Johnathan Whitfield, was told about this operating system while having his lunch decided to see how secure it was. He challenged around 15,000 people, mostly hackers and security experts, to penetrate a server running SECOS. The server was his website server.

[edit] The end of SECOS

Devlelopment of SECOS ceased in September 2000, due to the death of Thomas Ashworth, Ian Renton released a final version on September 2 2000. It was a bug fix version which fixed some of the flaws discovered. Only four machines in the world ran the operating system, none of which exist today. The last one was destroyed in a fire in March 2004 and the source code is now lost.

[edit] Beyond SECOS

John went on to operating system development using the unique abilities contained in SECOS that he seen during the attempts to exploit SECOS. Other testers and hackers have used the experiance gained from SECOS in their own careers and operating system projects. One of the testers is currently writing a new operating system called NorOS, which hopes to resurrect the SECOS concept.

Another operating system called SecOS is an embedded operating system derived from Linux, which is part of the SecIDS system made by Conostix.

SECOS is also a security solutions company.