Kaspersky introducing its own operating system, “with not even the slightest smell of Linux.”“I’ve anticipated this day for ages—the day when the first commercially available mass market hardware device based on our own secure operating system landed on my desk,” writes Eugene Kaspersky, Chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, in a blog post introducing company’s layer 3 switch powered by Kaspersky OS. Kaspersky believes the OS will be “ideal for applications where a small, optimized and secure platform is required”—particularly when it comes to Internet of Things.

The operating system is said to have three key distinctive features that set it apart. Kaspersky writes:

— First, it’s based on microkernel architecture, which allows to assemble ‘from blocks’ different modifications of the operating system depending on a customer’s specific requirements.

— Second, there’s a built-in security system, which controls the behavior of applications and the OS’s modules. In order to hack this platform, a cyber-baddie would need to break the digital signature, which—any time before the introduction of quantum computers—would be exorbitantly expensive.

— Third, everything has been built from scratch. Anticipating your questions: not even the slightest smell of Linux. All the popular operating systems aren’t designed with security in mind, so it’s simpler and safer to start from the ground up and do everything correctly. Which is just what we did.

The project nicknamed ‘11-11’, started 14 years ago on November 11 when the company held its first meeting and took its time to gradually build momentum. “The question to which we were searching for an answer was this: how can we build an operating system that will be impossible to hack in principle?” recalls Kaspersky. No matter how difficult, he adds, it is better “to build IoT/infrastructure devices from the very beginning in such a way that hacking them is practically impossible.”