seL4 News

We are thrilled to announce our co-chairs, Lucy Fletcher and Robbie VanVossen, for the seL4 summit 2026, which will be held in Vancouver, late August - early September (dates TBC).

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  Lucy Fletcher

  Software Engineer, Apple

  Lucy Fletcher is a software engineer at Apple based in Sydney, Australia, working on L4 microkernels and the surrounding ecosystems. Before joining Apple, she studied Computer Science at UNSW and worked with the Trustworthy Systems group, where she focused on the design and development of the seL4 device driver framework. Lucy is passionate about giving back to the seL4 community and supporting its continued growth.
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  Robbie VanVossen

  seL4 Technical Lead, DornerWorks

  Robbie VanVossen is an employee of DornerWorks, has 12 years of experience in embedded hypervisors, and 10 years of experience with the seL4 microkernel. His work and leadership led to the development of aarch64 virtualization support across the seL4 ecosystem, both in the microkernel and the user-space libraries. He has also developed multiple projects using the Rust language, including embedded implementations of device drivers and applications. He has strong interests in embedded security, virtualization, seL4, and Rust.

Videos of the seL4 Summit 2025 are now available on the seL4 YouTube channel! Links and slides can be found on the summit Program and Abstracts pages. Thanks to all the speakers for making the seL4 Summit 2025 a great success!

The seL4 Foundation thanks Riverside Research for sponsoring the seL4 Summit 2025 reception.

Riverside Research recently acquired Cog Systems, a Founding Member of the seL4 Foundation.

Riverside Research is a national security nonprofit serving the DOD and Intelligence Community. Through the company's Open Innovation Center (OIC), it invests in multidisciplinary research and development and encourages collaboration. Riverside Research's areas of expertise include Object and Activity Detection; Accelerated AI/ML; Zero Trust; Open Architectures; Computational Electromagnetics; Plasma Physics; Precision Timing; Terahertz Imaging; Commercial Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR); Collection Planning; and more. Learn more at www.riversideresearch.org.

See here if you are interested in sponsoring the seL4 Summit 2025.

The seL4 Foundation is pleased to welcome the Trusted Computing Center of Excellence (TCCoE) as Associate Member.

The Trusted Computing Center of Excellence™ (TCCoE) not-for-profit organization’s purpose is to lower barriers to adoption and facilitate the principled development and deployment of software and systems for which there is strong evidence of trustworthiness, including use of formal methods. Needs of the U.S. and allied defense, intelligence and security communities are our priorities. A major thrust is seL4®. While our colleagues at the seL4 Foundation focus on the code and formal proofs of the open source seL4® microkernel and closely related artifacts, the TCCoE focuses on curated software distributions (kernel, libraries, drivers, configurations, etc.) as bases of stable supported platforms on which to build trustworthy systems.

We are very fortunate to welcome five industry leaders to participate at the seL4 Summit 2025, in a session Building a business case for using a verified kernel: Collins Aerospace, DornerWorks, Kry10, NIO, and MEP. The panel will be moderated by Juliana Furgala from MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

On July 29, 2009, the last "sorry" of the seL4 functional correctness proof was eliminated. A "sorry" is an assumed theorem lacking a complete proof. "0 sorries" meant there was nothing left to prove: the project was finished. We now celebrate this day every year to mark the seL4 day, when the world's first formally verified kernel with a machine-checked code-level proof came into existence.

In July 2014, on the 29th to make the "seL4 day" a double-celebratory day, the seL4 code and proofs became open source, paving the way to the widespread use it enjoys today.

A big thank-you to all for your continued support!

Learn more about the history of seL4.

We are excited to announce the launch of the new seL4 docsite! This redesigned documentation site for the main seL4-related technologies provides a new structure and layout, improved navigation and easier access to information.

The docsite content will continue to evolve with updates and maintenance, and we welcome contributions from the community on documentation, tutorials and manuals.

We thank NCSC for their funding of this project, which follows their support of the development of the new seL4 website.

We welcome your feedback and we hope you enjoy the new site!

Have a look at the program of the seL4 Summit 2025. We have a great line-up of interesting seL4 work, with a combination of technical research and development, experience reports of seL4 in the field, technical discussions and birds-of-a-feather sessions.

Program at a glance. Go to the full program.

Keynotes

We are pleased to announce that the two keynotes for the seL4 Summit 2025 will be John Hatcliff from Kansas State University and Sebastian Jester from Cyberagentur. John will talk about Model-based Development for seL4 Microkit/Rust with Integrated Formal Methods using HAMR and Sebastian aboutFormally verified IT – Germany’s next cybersecurity paradigm.

Dr. John Hatcliff is a University Distinguished Professor and Lucas-Rathbone Professor of Engineering at Kansas State University working in the areas of safety-critical systems, software architectures, and software verification and certification. He leads the Laboratory on Specification, Analysis, and Transformation of Software (SAnToS Lab), whose research has been funded by national funding agencies and companies including Department of Defense, National Science Foundation, DARPA, Department of Homeland Security, US Army, NASA, NIH, ARO, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, SEI, Collins Aerospace, Galois, and Lockheed Martin.

Sebastian Jester is Head of Secure Hardware and Supply Chains at the Agentur für Innovation in der Cybersicherheit (Cyberagentur), which he joined in 2022. He is on leave from Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, latterly responsible for microelectronics R&D policy at the national and EU level. He holds a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Heidelberg and a Master of Physics from the University of Oxford. The Cyberagentur funds high-risk research and development projects with a high disruptive potential in the field of cybersecurity. The Cyberagentur’s goal is to advance internal and external security and technological sovereignty. It was created in 2020 by the German Federal Government and is funded by the Federal Ministry of Defence and the Federal Ministry of the Interior. The Cyberagentur is an associate member of the seL4 Foundation.

The seL4 Foundation thanks Proofcraft for becoming a Silver sponsor of the seL4 Summit 2025.

Founded by the seL4 verification leaders, Proofcraft offers commercial support and projects in formal verification in general, and involving seL4 specifically. By applying mathematical machine-checked software verification, Proofcraft increases critical software systems' reliability, safety and security, for a verified future.

See here if you are interested in sponsoring the seL4 Summit 2025.

The seL4 Foundation thanks UNSW Sydney for becoming a Bronze sponsor of the seL4 Summit 2025.

seL4 was created by the Trustworthy Systems (TS) team, which is now part of the UNSW, a founding member of the seL4 Foundation.

The team has a track record of designing and implementing systems software for performance and reliability, and using rigorous formal methods to prove that they meet their security and reliability goals. Their aims are to:

• shift the software industry away from ad-hoc, unreliable engineering practices, and towards more principled and trustworthy methods; and
• make verified software a default choice, especially in safety- and security-critical systems.

The team works with government and commercial partners, as well as the broader software engineering community, to drive this change.

See here if you are interested in sponsoring the seL4 Summit 2025.

The seL4 Foundation thanks Collins Aerospace for becoming a sponsor of the seL4 Summit 2025. Collins Aerospace has generously sponsored the seL4 summit every year since 2023.

Collins Aerospace, part of seL4 Foundation member RTX, has been a long-time core participant in the seL4 ecosystem. Collins was a prime contractor in the DARPA HACMS program which demonstrated the seL4-based incremental cyber retrofit of autonomous military vehicles. This was a major milestone in the growth of seL4, demonstrating that it protects against cyber attacks on real systems in operation. The same team also led the follow-on DARPA CASE program, aiming at designed-in cyber-resiliency, including the seL4-based framework for verified initialisation and configuration of systems architectures.

Collins Aerospace is now leading a team on the DARPA PROVERS program which has a goal of enhancing the security of defense and aerospace systems by dramatically improving the usability, flexibility, and accessibility of formal methods-based development and verification tools, and targeting seL4 as an implementation platform.

See here if you are interested in sponsoring the seL4 Summit 2025.

We are excited to announce the launch of the new seL4 website! The redesigned site is streamlined for easy access and navigation, with updated content accessible to a broader audience, and new material expanding the scope of topics and information related to seL4 and its ecosystem.

We thank NCSC for their funding of this project, Proofcraft and the seL4 Foundation for its execution, and the community members who provided input and feedback throughout the project.

Stay tuned for the revamp of the seL4 docsite.

We welcome your feedback and we hope you enjoy the new site!

The seL4 Foundation is pleased to welcome MEP as a Member. MEP is a voice communications supplier for Air Traffic and Maritime critical communications worldwide. Its Voice Communication System, the SureVoice Solid, runs on seL4 at its heart. MEP has chosen seL4 for process separation to achieve 24/7 availability.

The seL4 summit 2025 will be held in Prague, Czech Republic, 3 - 5 September 2025.

The seL4 summit will cover the complete seL4 ecosystem, consisting of the verified microkernel, as well as all seL4-related technology, tools, infrastructure, products, projects, and people.

Tickets include:

• Participation in the 3-day conference, including talks, keynotes, seL4 updates & discussions
• Networking with other seL4 experts and enthusiasts
• Reception and dinner

Register here

The early bird cut-off date is 3 August 2025.

A number of informal social activities will be organised by the seL4 community for Tuesday 2 Sep 2025. Stay tuned for more info!

• Share your seL4 work
• Share your seL4 experience
• Share your seL4 thoughts

Check the full Call For Presentations. To propose a talk, upload an abstract of one page or less by 21 April 2025 to the submission portal.

Also note the open invitation for a 5-minute slot to talk about your seL4 deployment.

We are pleased to announce that the seL4 Summit 2025 will be held in

Prague, Czech Republic, 3 - 5 September 2025.

Meet the Program Committee

Our team comes from various parts of the seL4 ecosystem: users, contributors, committers, experts, advocates, researchers, and engineers.

We will announce a Call for Presentations in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

The seL4 Foundation is pleased to welcome Germany's Cyberagentur as Associate Member, coinciding with the launch of five projects in its research program on an “Ecosystem of formally verified IT — provable cybersecurity (EvIT)”.

Two of the projects include work enhancing seL4. The Cyberagentur is joining the seL4 Foundation to underline the importance of this approach for making both highly complex IT systems and critical infrastructures more secure and to attract further supporters. The Cyberagentur funds cybersecurity research projects with a high risk and a very high potential of disruption.