“Jonathan Shapiro, Ph.D., is the key designer of EROS, a small,
capabilities-based open-source operating system notable for its
secure architecture. Shapiro began work on EROS as a graduate
student at the University of Pennsylvania along with colleagues Sam
Weber, Norm Hardy, Jonathan Smith and Mike Berry. Shapiro is now a
member of the research staff in the Pervasive Computing Department
at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Laboratories in New York, where
he works on secure and reliable operating systems.”
“When it comes to open-source operating systems, most people
think exclusively of Linux and OpenBSD. But there’s another
open-source OS whose architecture may be more secure than either of
them….“
“ISM: People don?t convert from a mostly working system unless
there?s a good reason. What will cause the change?”
“SHAPIRO: The main reasons are liability and new applications.
On the one hand, lawyers are gearing up to go after insecure
vendors, and on the other, there are new kinds of applications in
the e-commerce space that we can?t safely deploy on today?s
commodity operating systems. Customers need and want these new
applications.”