Immunix

» see immunix.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

If you are running Ubuntu right now, there is a piece of a dead company in your kernel. The profiles that stop your PDF reader from wandering into your ssh keys are AppArmor, and AppArmor was called SubDomain, and SubDomain was built to sell a Linux distribution that nobody bought.

Crispin Cowan and Joonees Chay founded WireX Communications in 1998 to commercialize SubDomain, which had started as a graduate project. What WireX actually shipped was Immunix, a hardened Linux built on Red Hat, and the hardening went a long way past a checklist of turned-off services. StackGuard changed the compiler so that a function could detect its own return address being overwritten, which meant the entire distribution was rebuilt from source with buffer overflow protection compiled in, and FormatGuard did the same trick for format string attacks. Alongside them sat SubDomain, which confined each program to a list of the files it was allowed to touch.

That was a serious piece of engineering in 1998, several years before the industry agreed that this was how you were supposed to do it. It was also a very hard thing to sell, because buying Immunix meant replacing your entire operating system rather than installing a product on top of the one you already had.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Immunix ran through the late nineties and into the early 2000s as the distribution you deployed on a machine facing the internet, and it had real credibility with people who read Bugtraq for a living. WireX was in the room for the creation of the Linux Security Modules interface, which is the hook in the kernel that all of this eventually plugged into.

Version 7.3 went out on 27 November 2003. Nothing followed it.

~ the sale ~

In early 2004 WireX renamed itself Immunix and dropped the Linux distribution entirely, rewriting SubDomain to run on top of SuSE through the LSM interface. That is the death: a company that had spent six years building an operating system decided the operating system was the part nobody wanted and kept the one module that was easy to sell.

Novell bought Immunix on 10 May 2005 and renamed SubDomain to AppArmor, marketing it for a while under the slightly embarrassing label "Novell AppArmor powered by Immunix". It became the default security module in SUSE Linux 10.1 in May 2007 and in Ubuntu 7.10 that October. Novell laid off most of the team in the same month it won Ubuntu.

~ the code that outlived the company ~

Canonical picked up maintenance in May 2009 and the core of it went into the mainline Linux kernel in July 2010. A graduate project became a company that spent six years failing to sell an operating system, and the one module it kept back is now compiled into the kernel running on tens of millions of machines. The brand is gone so thoroughly that immunix.org today resolves to a betting site.

I was at university while this was happening and had no reason to know any of it. The part that did reach me arrived about a decade later and without a name attached, which is normal for infrastructure. You do not install AppArmor. It is already there, doing a job specified by two people in Oregon for a product that failed.

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