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49
About
49
About
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---
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title: How does this work?
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title: The concept and team
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author: someone
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abstract: some abstract
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---
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The concept of this endeavour.
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# Mission
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List of names with some background information
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The goal of robur is to develop robust digital infrastructure. This goal is
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achieved by continuous maintainence of permissively licensed (MIT/ISC/BSD) open
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source libraries, which are used by various partners and supporters.
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Robur is a non-profit endeavour, the ultimate goal is not to earn as much as
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possible, but instead to enable more people to run their own digital
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infrastructure. Minimising the executable size of services and cutting down
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complexity is crucial to help people to understand the technology.
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Rewards (in terms of shirts, money, stickers, retreat attendance) will be given
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to contributors from the open source community.
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Experience in developing and deploying the technology itself will be reflected
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on in academic papers, and talks at workshops and conferences.
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Transparency is another goal of robur, the annual balance will be accessible to
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the public.
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# Non-profit company
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Supporters can make charitable donations to robur, which will be used for
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further development and maintainence of software and community infrastructure.
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Partners can contract robur to develop prototypes (see example
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[projects](/Projects)). Developed libraries will be open sourced, and are
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reusable by other interested parties. The application code itself will be
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exclusively copyrighted by the partner. Some terms are negotiable, e.g.
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whether the library code will be exclusively licensed to the partner for some
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time (maximum 6 months), influence on the development roadmap, service level
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agreements (on-call debugging, running infrastructure).
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# Team
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## Alfred
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Alfred is a hacker. He enjoys to write code since more than 15 years, but also
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travelling and repairing his recumbent bicycle, and being a barista.
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In 2013, Alfred did his PhD in computer science about formal verification of
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imperative code (using a higher-order separation logic and the theorem prover
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Coq). At the moment he is busy with reanimating an executable formal model of
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TCP/IP which can act as a test validator.
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Alfred co-authored a TLS implementation from the grounds up in OCaml.
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40
Technology
40
Technology
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abstract: some abstract
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---
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This is the site about our technology
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We develop digital infrastructure with a small footprint. This is in stark
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contrast with other approaches that try to patch general purpose operating
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systems by adding more layers of indirection.
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Each piece of digital infrastructure (or service) is (a) written in a high-level
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memory-safe programming language and (b) specialised to only contain the
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required functionality at compilation time. This (a) reduces the attack vectors
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and (b) drastically reduces the attack surface.
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The resulting service is executed as a virtual machine on any modern hypervisor.
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Its size is usually two orders of magnitude smaller (ranging from kilobytes to
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16 megabytes) than a UNIX, it boots within milliseconds.
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As programming language we use [OCaml](https://ocaml.org), a multi-paradigm
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programming language, which unifies functional, imperative, and object-oriented
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programming. OCaml has an expressive static type system, and type inference. A
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developer can specify complex invariants in the type system, which are
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checked at compile time, and violations are caught early.
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We discuss more reasons why we use OCaml [further down](#WhyOCaml).
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## MirageOS
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[MirageOS](https://mirage.io) started as a research project at the University
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of Cambridge in 2009.
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## Why OCaml
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OCaml code can be very fast (our TLS implementation reaches up to
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85% of the throughput of OpenSSL), and compiles either to native code on various
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architectures or to bytecode. It can even compile to JavaScript. OCaml is
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memory managed, individual developers don't have to manually allocate and
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release memory (which is a common source of security issues in other operating
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systems).
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In 2016, Facebook developed [reason](https://reasonml.github.io/), a dialect of
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OCaml which syntax is closer to JavaScript, and easier to comprehend for
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beginners. Reason and OCaml code can be easily combined in a single
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application, since the same compiler is used.
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