What is ORCA?
ORCA is a foundation within The Linux Foundation devoted to making isolation and compartmentalization approaches usable in real software stacks. Today, a single coding mistake or design flaw can still ripple into outages and serious security incidents.
The alliance exists to connect people who want to change that, focusing on concrete, deployable forms of defense in depth. By structuring systems so that components are cleanly separated, we aim to make vulnerabilities harder to weaponize and to contain the damage when they do surface.
Why now?
Attacks are becoming faster, cheaper, and more automated, especially with the help of AI tools. Manual defenses alone are struggling to keep up with the scale of probing and exploitation.
The industry already invests heavily in reducing the chance that a bug can be exploited. ORCA emphasizes the other half of the risk equation: limiting the consequences when something goes wrong. Strong compartment boundaries help ensure that one compromise does not translate into a full-system failure.
Where we work in the stack
ORCA is intentionally cross-layer. From languages and runtimes down to hardware, we are interested in techniques that reinforce one another across the stack:
How to get involved
- Join the mailing list. Subscribe to the ORCA mailing list to receive announcements, meeting notes, and community updates. Subscribe here .
- Follow the community calendar. View upcoming meetings, Tech Talks, and events on the ORCA calendar. View calendar .
- Open to many communities. ORCA spans hardware, operating systems, programming languages, user-space runtimes, and applied security. If you care about isolation, there is a place for you here.
- Share real-world scenarios. We are especially interested in organizations willing to try out isolation and compartmentalization techniques in production or near-production settings and report back what works.
- Give a Tech Talk. ORCA hosts monthly Tech Talks and welcomes speakers from across the community. If you have a system, paper, recent result, or hands-on experience with isolation or compartmentalization, we would love to hear it.
- Watch for the kickoff. A community kick-off meeting is being organized to introduce the foundation, early projects, and initial use cases.
To express interest, ask questions, or discuss potential participation, email info@orca-lf.org.
You can also join our community Slack workspace: Join the ORCA Slack .