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title: What is robur?
author: someone
---
At robur, we build performant bespoke minimal operating systems for high-assurance services.
With our approach to systems development we provide the following advantages for you:
* systems based on the unikernel pioneer [MirageOS](https://mirage.io)
* secure implementation guarded against memory corruption, typelevel problems, leaky abstraction and unforseen state
* ready for the cloud, services run on all major hypervisors
* instant boot
* competitive performance comparable to C / C++
* can target embedded devices because of small size and the ability to compile to native code
* minimized state allows to reason about entire systems and their adherence to the specification
* extensive library ecosystem, yet minimal trusted code base at runtime
* rapid prototyping with a seamless path from prototype to production

Computers on the Internet get compromised mostly to gain or block access to data.
User data is being downloaded, leaked and sold, or ransomware blocks access to user data until a fee
is paid. Other common attacks target compute resources, to use them in denial of service
attacks or to manipulate opinion with chatbots.

Common software stacks often include legacy parts at runtime that provide unnecessary attack surface. 
Critical security updates are rarely deployed on time, because they result in unforeseen behaviour.  Also, lots of embedded
devices are missing a secure update channel.

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Instead of trying to fix these decades-old operating systems, which were
designed based on demands at that time (e.g. time-multiplexed multi-user
computers), we build small services from scratch with security in mind.  Each
service is run as a separate virtual machine on any hypervisor with only the
strictly necessary code.

This makes our virtual machines much smaller.  The binary size of an HTTP server
with TLS support is around 4% compared to one using a conventional Linux
operating system, making the attack surface much smaller.

Additionally, we use a functional programming language with static
types and automated memory management.  This
reduces the attack vectors: temporal and spatial memory corruption are no
concern anymore.  The declarative programming style makes it possible to
formally verify the correctness of the entire virtual machine with a theorem
prover.

One of our unikernels boots within milliseconds, and has a
minimal memory footprint.  For client-side features that run in a webbrowser, we
compile to JavaScript from the same codebase, to ensure consistency. The strong
and static type system helps to detect errors early, and enables rapid
prototyping.  For production use the prototype code can be further optimized for
performance.

## Conclusion

MirageOS started as a research project, and has matured to a full suite for
building secure operating systems, with libraries that work well in production
and cover a variety of application needs.  MirageOS is a game changer for secure
network services, since the attack surface is minimised to 1% of the size of
other contemporary operating systems. In addition, common attack vectors are
avoided by the usage of a programming language with memory safety.  A unikernel
boots within tens of milliseconds, and services can be spawned on demand. When a
request (e.g. a DNS request) for a unikernel comes in, the kernel boots up,
handles the request, and is destroyed after an inactivity period. Only the
necessary services need to run, and they can be short-lived to minimize state in
the system.

The choice of a high-level programming language also allows for rapid
prototyping, new features can be developed quickly.  In contrast to scripting
languages, the code does not need to be re-implemented for production use (but
nevertheless can be fine-tuned for performance).


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