Celebrating innovations that apply and enhance CheriBSD to transform digital technology and create a more resilient and secure future.
The FreeBSD Foundation, in partnership with Innovate UK, is proud to announce the inaugural Beacon Awards to celebrate DSbD innovators working with and enhancing CheriBSD, one of the notable current breakthroughs made possible by FreeBSD.
FreeBSD has been a leading operating system used by innovators for 30 years to improve computing security, performance, and efficiency for practically every digitally-connected person.
The first Beacon Awards will occur at the Spring DSbD All Hands event, on the 13th of March 2024 at the Oval Cricket Ground (aka Kia Oval), in Kennington, London.
Who can submit *
Any company, individual, or group that are members of the DSbD ecosystem and are invited to the DSbD All-Hands event, working with CheriBSD in the following ways:
- Adapting existing applications to run on Morello or CHERI-RISC-V with memory safety on CheriBSD. This category will recognize high-impact work in the DSbD ecosystem that can evidence how it has enriched and enhanced the CheriBSD environment by porting existing applications to run on Morello or CHERI-RISC-V with CheriBSD.
- High-impact work that uses the Morello board to verify or improve the integrity and safety of mainstream FreeBSD or other open-source software. Code bases verified on Morello that are either available under an OSI-approved Open-source license or that are proprietary on top of CheriBSD. Evidence is required to show impact of identified issues/bugs and associated approach to patch creation and upstreaming.
- Refactoring code to use CHERI compartmentalization. This category will recognize performance gains against existing IPC mechanisms OR security gains from refactoring code to use compartments across different use cases.
Key dates
Call for submissions will open on January 24, 2024 and close on February 14, 2024.
Participants will be notified of their status by March 6, 2024
Other details
Awards judges are esteemed members of the CHERI, Morello, FreeBSD, and DSbD community, including representatives from ARM, FreeBSD Foundation, Linaro, UKRI, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh.
A total of $10,000 in award monies will be awarded to winning submissions.
The FreeBSD Foundation and Innovate UK intend to run the Awards at future All Hands events.
* Read the Contest Rules for complete eligibility and other requirements
