Run sensitive workloads on infrastructure you own — with privacy guarantees, data integrity, and no vendor platform you have to trust.
Why Private Compute
Trusting environments
is no longer sufficient.
Most infrastructure is built on delegated trust — cloud providers, hypervisors, vendors. For sensitive computation, that tradeoff doesn't hold.
5BSD provides the execution substrate: isolated, auditable, tamper-evident, and under your operational control.
Isolation
Processes, jails, containers, and sockets interact only through explicitly granted capability descriptors. Unauthorized access paths are structurally absent.
Least Privilege
No process holds capabilities it was not explicitly granted. Policy is defined once and enforced at the kernel — not approximated through configuration.
Auditability
Security-relevant events are interceptable and authorizable before completion. Policy lives in userspace where it can be inspected, versioned, and audited.
Verifiable State
Encryption keys are kernel-resident and never surfaced to userland. What happened can be proven without exposing what was processed.
Use Cases
Where unverifiable state
is not an option.
Environments where the cost of data exposure, tampered execution, or unauditable state is too high to delegate to someone else's platform.
Secure AI Workflows
Run inference and training on sensitive data without exposing inputs, weights, or intermediate state to the execution environment operator.
Regulated Data Processing
Process healthcare, financial, or legal data with audit trails that satisfy compliance requirements — without relying on vendor attestation.
Confidential Analytics
Compute over sensitive datasets. Results are verifiable; inputs remain protected.
Supply-Chain Verification
Sign and verify build artifacts, execution environments, and deployment pipelines from source to production.
Sensitive Automation
Automated workflows over privileged systems with capability-bounded execution and signed outputs.
Critical Infrastructure
Systems where availability, integrity, and auditability are non-negotiable — on hardware you control, under policy you define.
How It Works
Tamper-evident by design.
Traceable from execution to output.
Integrity and provenance are not add-ons. They are structural properties of how 5BSD executes workloads.
Integrity
Capability boundaries enforce what can touch what. Keyvault keeps cryptographic material in the kernel. Signed artifacts and audit trails mean integrity can be verified after the fact — not just asserted at deployment.
- —Kernel-resident key management via Keyvault
- —Capability-bounded process and container isolation
- —Signed artifacts with verifiable provenance
- —Audit trails for every security-relevant event
Provenance
Where did this data come from, how did it move, who touched it, what produced this result. 5BSD makes those questions answerable — without requiring trust in a third-party audit service.
- —Structured telemetry with OTLP output
- —Hardware-assisted execution tracing (Intel PT)
- —171 DTrace profiles via bsdinstruments
- —CPU power, temperature, and frequency telemetry
Security Model
Built from first principles.
Each component addresses a specific failure mode in conventional infrastructure. Security properties are structural, not configured. Source is available for inspection at every layer.
Data Integrity
Control exactly what your system can do — and lock everything else out.
cap_protectSecurityCoalitionsKeyvault
The Capability Runtime is a kernel-level protection layer made up of discrete, auditable modules. cap_protect and SecurityCoalitions ensure processes, jails, files, sockets, and containers can only interact through explicitly granted capabilities — there is no other path. Keyvault keeps encryption keys in the kernel, never surfaced to userland. CapabilityAccessControlList adds fine-grained per-capability access lists on top.
SecurityCoalitions★ 3Keyvault★ 6CapabilityAccessControlList★ 1
Data Loss Prevention & System Policy
Define your security policy in userspace. Enforce it at every layer.
liboessys/security/oesmac_abacpf
Security policy shouldn't live only in the kernel. OpenEndpointSecurity surfaces a structured API to userspace for intercepting and authorizing events — process execution, file access, network activity — before they complete. mac_abac brings Attribute-Based Access Control into the MAC framework so policy can be defined and audited in userspace. pf closes the loop at the network boundary with stateful packet filtering.
Developer Tooling
First-class tools for building on and observing 5BSD — for the long term.
bsdinstrumentsbsdtracehwtlmBSDGhidra
FreeBSDKit is a Swift framework for building native tools and applications on 5BSD. ObservableBSD gives you full visibility into what the system is doing: bsdinstruments ships 171 DTrace profiles with OTLP output for Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki; bsdtrace uses Intel Processor Trace for hardware-assisted execution tracing; hwtlm surfaces CPU power, temperatures, and frequencies. BSDGhidra (Apache 2.0) extends Ghidra for BSD systems.
Repositories
All permissively licensed. All open source.
Get Started
Ready to run workloads
you can verify?
Read the documentation to understand the architecture, then explore the source. Everything is permissively licensed — BSD-2-Clause and Apache 2.0.
Open Source
BSD-2-Clause and Apache 2.0 throughout. No licensing surprises when you ship products built on 5BSD.
Linux Compatible
Run Linux binaries without rewriting your stack. BSD foundations, Linux investment preserved.
Contribute
We welcome contributors in OS engineering, security, virtualization, observability, and systems programming.