Introducing Camelot-OS
A New Open-Source Operating System for Secure IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) continues to transform everyday life — from connected wearables to industrial controllers — but this rapid growth also brings new security challenges. Embedded devices often run lightweight operating systems that prioritize performance and low power usage, sometimes at the expense of safety and robustness. Recognizing this gap, the Camelot-OS project has emerged as an open-source initiative aimed at building a modern, trustworthy foundation for secure IoT systems.
What Is Camelot-OS?
Hosted under the camelot-os namespace on GitHub, Camelot-OS encompasses a family of repositories focused on an open-source, security-oriented operating system ecosystem for embedded devices. The most prominent component visible today is the Sentry kernel, a high-security microkernel designed specifically for embedded systems that include microcontrollers and security hardware like Secure Elements. This microkernel architecture is crafted to provide strong isolation between components — a cornerstone for secure firmware and trusted execution environments in constrained devices.
Alongside the kernel itself, the Camelot-OS organization includes supporting tooling such as SDKs, device-tree utilities, and sample applications — all building blocks toward a fully integrated, open IoT OS.
Why It Matters: Security and Industrial-Grade Quality
The genesis of the Camelot-OS vision aligns with discussions from SSTIC 2024, one of the premier security conferences in Europe. In the talk “Once upon a time in IoT: an industry-grade OS perspective for IoT security”, experts outlined how current Open-Source solutions fall short for high-security, high-robustness use cases in industrial IoT. After reviewing the state of the art and finding no sufficiently secure open solution for modern microcontroller platforms, they described efforts to build a versatile, security-oriented OS — laying conceptual groundwork that resonates with Camelot-OS’s goals of runtime isolation, robustness, and industrial tooling support.
This context highlights why an open project like Camelot-OS is especially relevant today: it bridges the gap between academic/proprietary secure OS research and practical, community-driven tools that developers and integrators can adopt and evolve collectively.
Key Features and Philosophy
While the project is actively evolving, several themes are clear from its repositories and documentation:
Microkernel Architecture: By minimizing the trusted computing base and isolating components, Camelot-OS aims for a secure foundation appropriate for sensitive embedded tasks.
Secure Integration: Designed with hardware security modules in mind (e.g., secure elements), enabling strong cryptographic backing for operations.
Open-Source Collaboration: The project welcomes contributions through its modular repos, including SDKs and examples, lowering the barrier for developers to experiment and contribute.
Toolchain and Industrial Readiness: Influenced by modern build systems and workflows similar to industry standards, enabling reproducible builds and traceable software supply chains.
standalone offline production: With the industrial constraints in mind, such as confidentiality requirements and disconnected or air-gapped production environment, Camelot-OS is made in order to allows fully autonomous and offline project configuration and delivery, including in the same time Open-Source components and industrial value added for project-relative specific functional parts
Who Should Care?
Camelot-OS will be of interest to:
IoT developers building embedded products that need strong isolation and security features.
Security researchers exploring microkernel-based operating systems and secure embedded design.
Open-source contributors drawn to operating system internals, safety-critical code, and platform-agnostic tooling.
Product engineers evaluating alternatives to traditional RTOS platforms that may lack formal isolation or robust security tooling.
As Camelot-OS evolves, it promises to become a vital option in the landscape of secure, open IoT operating systems — combining academic rigor, community collaboration, and real-world industrial insight. Stay tuned for deeper dives into its architecture, tooling, and how to build your first application on top of it.
If you want, I can also help write a follow-up post about Camelot-OS’s architecture, how to get started with the SDK, or a comparison with other IoT OS choices.