The Portable Open Source Security Elements (POSSE) project was a co-operative venture between the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

Distributed Systems Laboratory, the

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free software, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking NetBSD ...

project and others. It received funding through a grant from the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

(DARPA). The project's goal was to increase the security of some

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

projects, including

Apache The Apache ( ) are several Southern Athabaskan language-speaking peoples of the Southwestern United States, Southwest, the Southern Plains and Northern Mexico. They are linguistically related to the Navajo. They migrated from the Athabascan ho ...

and

OpenSSL OpenSSL is a software library for applications that provide secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping, and identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTTPS web ...

. The project ran from 2001 to April 2003, when the grant from DARPA was prematurely terminated.

Overview

This was a security initiative directed by the University of Pennsylvania Distributed Systems Laboratory and paid for through the Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems programme. POSSE was a US$2,125,000 grant "to introduce advanced security features used in special-purpose government computers into standard office PCs." The United States government hoped to benefit from the availability of better security features in affordable, standardized computers and software. OpenBSD was selected as "the computing world’s most secure forum for the development of open-source software" and approximately US$1,000,000 was allotted to its development. Colleagues in the POSSE project included Theo de Raadt, the founder and leader of the

Project, Ben Laurie of the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

and

Group, and numerous faculty and graduate students from the

. In April 2003, speaking in an interview to the Canadian newspaper ''

The Globe and Mail ''The Globe and Mail'' is a Newspapers in Canada, Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in Western Canada, western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of more than 6 million in 2024, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on week ...

'', Theo de Raadt remarked on the occupation of Iraq: "I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a

cruise missile A cruise missile is an unmanned self-propelled guided missile that sustains flight through aerodynamic lift for most of its flight path. Cruise missiles are designed to deliver a large payload over long distances with high precision. Modern cru ...

doesn't get built." Jonathan Smith, the head of the POSSE project, stated that US military officials had expressed discomfort with this comment. DARPA's funding for the project was subsequently terminated. It was theorized that the US government disapproved of de Raadt's comments and that they led to the decision to cancel the grant. However, DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker claimed that it was triggered by "recent world events and specifically the evolving threat posed by increasingly capable nation-states."

References

{{Reflist

External links

The POSSE Project homepage

CNET, 17 April 2003: Defense agency pulls OpenBSD funding

LWN.net, 23 April 2003: DARPA Cancels OpenBSD Funding

Worker's World, 1 May 2003: Pentagon punishes software developer for anti-war comments
DARPA OpenBSD