A sovereign OS to ensure the confidentiality of public officials: this is the proposal of two senators who are demanding an action plan from the government within a year.
Examined in the Senate until July 7, the bill aimed at securing and regulating the digital space has been overtaken by current events: an amendment has been tabled in reaction to the riots that followed the death of Nahel. But the text is also crossed by sea serpents. Among the subjects resurfacing punctually: the French operating system.
In an amendment tabled on July 3, Senators Pierre Ouzoulias and Marie-Noëlle Lienemann set a binding timetable for the government, with the presentation, one year after the law comes into force, of a ” strategy for developing and deploying a French operating system for all public administration digital equipment. »
This national OS should be generalized on both computers and mobile phones ” in order to guarantee better sovereignty and security of the data collected or produced by these administrations “, we read in the explanatory memorandum. However, the OS market today is largely dominated by American solutions.
This is the case for Android and iOS on the smartphone side: the combined share of Google and Apple OSes is around 99%. On the computer side, the addition of Windows, macOS and Chrome OS reaches 93% market share. Again, these three operating systems are of American origin: they come from Microsoft, Apple and Google.
” The French state today assumes a loss of digital sovereignty to the benefit of the United States “, deplore the two elected officials. ” The alternatives are currently insufficient to allow the widespread use of a national or European operating system “. Nevertheless, ” the state must ensure » to public officials the confidentiality of their work, for reasons of sovereignty.
The operating system is the centerpiece of a computer, since it is this software that manages and coordinates hardware resources (internal and those of peripherals) and running applications. The OS is, in short, a conductor. In general, it also includes a graphical interface to facilitate its handling and the “dialogue” between man and machine.
The CLIP OS track
The idea of a sovereign OS, contested, periodically comes up in the news. In 2010, Orange said it wanted to think about creating a European OS with other major operators. It had been defended by Arnaud Montebourg, then Minister for Productive Recovery, and by deputies who had defended the creation of a Commissariat for Digital Sovereignty.
In fact, the most advanced initiative, which the amendment does not address, is CLIP OS, an operating system developed since the mid-2000s by Anssi – the state cyber defense agency. At the time, it was the Central Directorate for Information Systems Security, the ancestor of Anssi, which was on the spot. The CLIP OS project was resumed in 2011 with the creation of the agency.
CLIP OS was initially designed “to meet the specific needs of the administration”, we read on its presentation sheet. He is ” based on a Linux kernel ” and is ” able to handle information of multiple levels of sensitivity “. Although its development is active and open to everyone, there is a size limit: today there is no ready-to-use version.
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