Microsoft’s new Multi Principal OS
We are not talking about a new Operating System being designed by Microsoft, its about Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Last week, Microsoft Research released an interesting paper [PDF] about a Web browser it calls Gazelle that’s constructed in such a way to act like an operating system with the browser kernel exclusively protecting resources and sharing across Web sites.
The idea behind Gazelle is to create a browser that is more secure for the now typical dynamic pages we find on the Web. According to Microsoft, Gazelle is different as no existing browsers, including new architectures, have a multi-principal operating system constructed in such a way that provides the browser-based OS exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources.
“Gazelle’s security model is centered around protecting principals from one another by separating their respective resources into hardware-isolated protection domains. Any sharing between two different principals must be explicit using cross-principal communication (or IPC) mediated by Browser Kernel.”
As for now, the browser is only open for discussion and no release is expected in any form.
This tells us that Microsoft may not be the best at IE, but at least they have something in oven for us that may soon turn out to be the best of all.
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