Secure64 Software Corporation is a software development company headquartered in Fort Collins, CO, USA, building server applications.

History

Secure64 was founded in 2002 and began full-scale development in 2005. Its founders include Bill Worley, CTO, a former chief scientist of

Hewlett Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company. It was founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard in 1939 in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, Californi ...

and lead developer of

PA-RISC Precision Architecture reduced instruction set computer, RISC (PA-RISC) or Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture (HP/PA or simply HPPA), is a computer, general purpose computer instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hewlett-Packard f ...

and PA-WideWord technologies. Secure64 has filed for several

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s.{{Cite web , url=http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/032007-secure64-builds-dns-appliance-with.html , title=Secure64 builds DNS appliance with Itanium server – Network World , access-date=2007-12-05 , archive-date=2007-09-04 , archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070904001552/http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/032007-secure64-builds-dns-appliance-with.html , url-status=dead

Technology

SourceT Micro OS

The SourceT Micro OS executes on standard

Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...

server hardware, and provides the foundation for Secure64

software application Application software is any computer program that is intended for end-user use not computer operator, operating, system administration, administering or computer programming, programming the computer. An application (app, application program, sof ...

s. Secure64 uses the term "micro OS" to describe SourceT, because, although it shares attributes of traditional

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

s and

monolithic kernel A monolithic kernel is an operating system software architecture, architecture with the entire operating system running in kernel space. The monolithic model differs from other architectures such as the microkernel in that it alone defines a high ...

s, it does not fit the classical definition of either. Like microkernels, SourceT adheres to the principles that minimal code should execute in kernel mode (currently less than 4,000 lines of code in SourceT), and that all applications and operating system services such as File system,

device drivers In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabli ...

and

protocol stack The protocol stack or network stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite or protocol family. Some of these terms are used interchangeably but strictly speaking, the ''suite'' is the definition of the communication protoc ...

s should not execute in kernel mode. However, like monolithic kernel architectures, SourceT's operating system services are accessed through system service calls rather than through

interprocess communication In computer science, interprocess communication (IPC) is the sharing of data between running processes in a computer system. Mechanisms for IPC may be provided by an operating system. Applications which use IPC are often categorized as clients ...

with user-mode servers. Unlike general-purpose

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, which are designed to execute on a wide variety of hardware platforms, SourceT was specifically designed to take advantage of some of the unique security and performance features of the Itanium microprocessor to create a high performance, highly secure architecture. These unique Itanium features include: *Completely independent read/write/execute privileges on memory pages *Hardware controlled memory compartments with protection IDs *Separation of control information from data on system stacks *Inability to execute code from system stacks *High performance from

instruction-level parallelism Instruction-level parallelism (ILP) is the Parallel computing, parallel or simultaneous execution of a sequence of Instruction set, instructions in a computer program. More specifically, ILP refers to the average number of instructions run per st ...

Self-Protecting Network Stack

Secure64 has a patent pending for the queued, non-blocking and self-protecting communications architecture used by SourceT. Designed from the ground up with a queued, scalable architecture that differs significantly from a traditional

Berkeley sockets A Berkeley ( BSD) socket is an application programming interface (API) for Internet domain sockets and Unix domain sockets, used for inter-process communication (IPC). It is commonly implemented as a library of linkable modules. It originated wi ...

architecture, the network stack accelerates network I/O performance and automatically detects and drops malformed or flooding packets, such as those received as the victim of a

Denial-of-service attack In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyberattack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host co ...

Products

Secure64 DNS products are

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercion). Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, or any other entity or ...

-hardened commercial

DNS The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed name service that provides a naming system for computers, services, and other resources on the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various informatio ...

appliances, deployed on a proprietary

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit central processing units (CPU) and arithmetic logic units (ALU) are those that are based on processor registers, a ...

running on

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

hardware. Some of these products include: * Authoritative DNS server, Secure64 DNS Authority * Caching DNS server, Secure64 DNS Cache * DNS Network Management, Secure64 DNS Manager * DNSSEC, Secure64 DNS Signer * DNS-based Network Security, Secure64 DNS Guard

History

Technology

SourceT Micro OS

Self-Protecting Network Stack

Products

References

See also