Software Engineering Institute

The goal of this project is to demonstrate the practicality of a comprehensive approach to guaranteeing the trustworthiness of computer systems. It will focus on building a fully Linux-capable computer on top of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), using open source CPU and system-on-chip (SoC) designs compiled with an open source HDL toolchain. This would be the first known prototype of an open source, self-hosting hardware and software platform capable of empirically proving that a fielded system’s trust is equivalent to that of its collected sets of sources (hardware, software, and build tool chains).