Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems.
The announcement of Amutable on the company’s new website, Amutable.com, elaborates on this new firm as:
“Today’s infrastructure approaches security reactively. Software agents watch for vulnerabilities and intrusions; attackers refine their evasion. These defensive approaches are costly, brittle, and ineffective.
We settle for heuristics because we lack a picture of what is correct and the means to protect it. We wire buildings and wait for circuit breakers to trip. We look for termites instead of building with steel.
Integrity should be built into every critical infrastructure project. And an organization’s developer and operational teams should be able to meet trust and compliance goals as a natural result of good tooling and architecture, not as a burdensome detour.
Amutable will define that missing picture and replace heuristics with rigor. Over the coming months, we’ll be pouring foundations for verification and building robust capabilities on top.
Amutable’s mission is to deliver verifiable integrity to Linux workloads everywhere. We look forward to working towards this goal with the broader Linux community.”
In addition to being founded by Chris Kühl, Christian Brauner, and Lennart Poettering, others joining Amutable include David Strauss, Rodrigo Campos Catelin, Zbyszek Jędrzejewski-Szmek, Kai Lüke, Daan de Meyer, Joaquim Rocha, Aleksa Sarai, and Michael Vogt.
Lennart Poettering had been employed by Microsoft since 2022. Christian Brauner also was employed by Microsoft working on the Linux kernel up until this month. Chris Kühl was also a former Microsoft employee.
It will be interesting to see ultimately Amutable’s approach for delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems with build integrity, boot integrity, and runtime integrity.
