Building a secure OS: the hard list — what I found and what I'm fixing in IONA OS

Every operating system has security gaps. Most never publish them. I am publishing mine. IONA OS is a sovereign operating system written from scratch in Rust. It has a kernel, a GUI, a blockchain protocol, a programming language, and a 140,000‑line AI running in Ring 0. It is designed to be secure by default. But secure is a journey, not a destination. Here is the hard list — the security issues I found in IONA OS, and what I am doing about them. 1. The filesystem is not encrypted at rest IONAFS reads and writes sectors in plain text directly to the disk. I already have a real ChaCha20‑Poly1305 engine with per‑file key derivation ( fs/encrypted_storage.rs ), but it is only used for backup/distribution — not for everyday local reading and writing ( fs/ionafs/mod.rs ). Why this matters: For a journalist or a civil servant, this is the central threat scenario: a lost device, confiscation at a border, or seizure. What I'm doing about it: Integrating encrypted_storage.rs into the normal IONAFS read/write path. Every write will be encrypted automatically. The key will be derived from a PIN or TPM. 2. Deleting a file does not destroy it delete_file() removes only the index entry. The data sectors remain on the disk, recoverable with standard forensic tools. Why this matters: For users with high security requirements — journalists, activists, government officials — this is a critical gap. What I'm doing about it: Adding a shred() function that overwrites the data sectors with random patterns before releasing them, with a configurable number of passes. 3. The keystore uses XOR, not real encryption security/keystore.rs pretends to use AES/ChaCha in its comments, but the actual implementation is a simple XOR stream — trivial to break once an attacker has access to the disk. Why this matters: This is a critical vulnerability. XOR is not encryption. If an attacker has access to the disk, they can recover the keys. What I'm doing about it: Replacing the XOR stream with real ChaCh