Slashdot Mirror
DARPA to Fund Open Source Security Research
divert writes "Just got an email on the SEC-PROG mailing list that DARPA is looking to fund security research for open source operating systems." Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
This is sooo arrogant, I'm disgusted. Dude, you're talking about DARPA. They funded the development of The Internet. Were it not for them this site wouldn't exist.
And why exactly do you need a full featured Unix system to run a firewall?
There are environments where you need performance and security. This is especially true of supercomputing environments where different people with different security levels all have access to the same physical machine(s).
Just because you have a firewall, doesn't mean you aren't prone to attack. You are certainly less likely to be attacked from the outside world, but who said the attack had to come from the outside world?
If you have a person with physical access to a machine you are trying to secure, it should still be extremely difficult for the person to gain entry into it.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
DARPA, like anything else governmental, is inherently politcal. While they have to frame these proposals as public processes, the fact is, if you weren't working on this proposal months ago, well before it was first published, you don't have a chance. I'll guarantee you that there are already 5-10 different labs working on the problem, who have already extensively discussed the DARPA program manager's expectations (most likely with the program manager or the program manager's close colleagues).
Yes, it's a very inbred, good-ol-boys type of process, but that's life in military research...
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
... it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." --Newton to Hooke, 5 Feb. 1676
*Real* research is about incremental improvements to the existing base of knowledge.
2) System configuration and administration tools and methods
That'd help.
Sounds like they have some pretty high goals that require a lot of cooperation between various groups. I wonder how they intend to solicit that cooperation.
Namely, StackGuard and several of the other Immunix technologies were developed under DARPA grants.
Wil
--
Wil
wiki
"Who do you think put up the money to develop BSD in the first place? DARPA, of course."
And let's also not forget a little startup that got its start from DARPA: Sun Microsystems.
--Storm
www.lids.org
I am running it on a test system and I am extremely impressed. It implements capabilities allowing you to assign least priviledge so if someone gets root on the box they still can't do anything. No longer do you need to open yourself up to attack just because a program needs to bind to a low number port, for example. It's a huge boost to the security of any Linux system. This plus the standard techniques used to secure a box can really lock things down.
I know just the methodology they need: get more people to do the code audit.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
FYI: All the USPTO OCR stuff runs on Linux. There was a write-up a while ago in Linux Journal.
Try Security Enhanced Linux.
Actually, they can have bugs, but not in the security section (all code has bugs - 1st law of programming). However, Trusted Systems are designed to be trusted DESPITE errors / bugs.
At last someone who understands the difference between security and trust.
I was at the last CHATS workshop and both OpenBSD and TrustedBSD were present, along with representatives from the Linux community and other open source projects as well as commercial vendors.
While OpenBSD maybe secure, it is not trusted and will never meet the requirements for a highly trusted system (LSPP/the old B1). This is because Theo's customers don't want it (as I recall it).
richard.
It has no SMP support for one thing.
Why does this matter? Sure doesn't matter if you're running a firewall.
Who do you think put up the money to develop BSD in the first place? DARPA, of course.
Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
I've seen OpenBSD folks make a lot of claims, but I've never before seen one claim that all research into secure OSes should come to a halt now that it exists.
-
I wouldn't say that's the way they "usually" work. If you are a university or a non-profit, maybe. If not, you work under contract to them. If you are a small business or individual, you can get an SBIR contract.
It's a lot easier if you affiliate yourself with a business or academic institution that already does business w/DARPA.
Right, please give the correct file permissions to do this:
a) Accesing the net is fine, but setting up a server is not allowed (helps defeating trojans).
b) Just for safety, my Napster client may only access MP3's on my harddisk. MP3's on my harddisk and the NFS share are accessible to everybody. The Napster client may not access any other file except for its configuration, etc.
c) user joe may not run X, only console.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
DARPA does do some interesting stuff. A lot of it has ended up with pretty wide utility. Take, for example, the Internet. That's right. If you didn't know already, DARPA is the organization that funded the development of TCP/IP and the earliest versions of the Internet. So, in a lot of ways, this is right up DARPA's ally. I wouldn't be suprised if there is still DARPA-funded code floating around in things like telnetd, sendmail, bind, etc.
I think the point is to push the state of the art ahead, not fiddle with existing systems. I mean your analogy is similar to "Would you rather take a bicycle or a skateboard to fly to the moon" instead of researching how to make rockets.
-- Remember: Wherever you go, there you are!
Well clearly unix.
But thats not the choice.
Its unix vs. writing a new os.
New OS wins for me.
Yes, thats a real nice hack. I am talking about a practical approach, not a nasty add on hack.
Hm, you are quite silly.
Read it again. Stop worshipping at the altar of unix.
It is not perfect.
Typing from a unix system... damn , still no IE beating browsers yet!
Well, this is another nice hack.
Hacks to the unix security model are nothing new,
and are also nothing interesting.
Posix ACLs, privilege bits, online
tripwire style things, ptrace abusers,
are all pretty damn skanky.
And I would prefer an elegant unix with
lax security that I know the limits of,
to a clunky add on laden unix with no
real coherent security model.
Of course, an OS that used a capability model
would be better...
Yep, this is possible - look at qmail,
....)
to be secure, there are lots of user accounts.
Each bit runs under a different one.
Unfortuanately, its just a hack. To add users
you need root access, ie ultimate boredom for root.
Or package management nightmares with coordinating uids. Maybe this could be solved with a better PAM plugin.
However, if you make a new user for
every app automatic, kernel checks go
like this:
userspace:
system_call(arg1,arg2,...);
kernelspace:
user = current_program->user;
do_check_on_whether_user_is_allowed(user);
this could be:
looking through a set of acls on a file.
checking a privelege bit.
checking if the uid is 0.
do_the_job();
in a cap based os:
userspace1:
call(cap, arg1, arg2,
kernelspace call handler:
dest = get_dest(cap);
copy_args_to_dest(dest);
schedule_dest();
(dest can be kernel or user task)
dest:
do_the_job();
So in a cap based os the possesion of a cap means you are allowed to do something. No funky checks.
The checks are done in userspace (no kernel policy)
when you are given the caps.
so doing this in a unixy os would be drastically inefficient if it was done system wide.
Well, this is ok if all you are interested in
is system security. Ie you don't want to get rooted.
But to be honest, I don't trust most programs I run with my own files. I don't want the huge unaudited mozilla to be able to write to my thesis.
Thats where unix can not be fixed in an efficient way. You need to fundamentally break posix, unfortunately.
Ok.
You seem to have got the userspace/kernelspace split mixed up with the root/normal user split.
The first is a difference in memory mapping. When you are running a normal program, your own memory is mapped appropriately as some of readable, writable, and executable. The kernel is always mapped non readable, non writable, and non executable. When entering the kernel ( eg system call, page fault, interrupt), the kernel memory is changed to be readable, writable, and executable.
The second is how the kernel responds to system calls. When a system call is called, if it is a privileged operation, the kernel will perform a check to see if the program is allowed to do this.
In old unix, this was often just a check to see if the uid in the process control structure was 0. In linux, it is usually a check of a privelege bit ( evilly called capabilities by posix and linux). So different processes can have different set of priveleges.
So, in unix, you su to root. This doesn't make you run in kernel mode. You are still running just like a normal user. The only difference is, when you do a system call, the kernel grants you a special privelege to bypass normal security checks.
This is wierdo special casing. Not nice.
In a capability system, a token is passed along with any other arguments to a system call. This token proves to the kernel that you are allowed to do the call you asked for. No wierd special cases. No acl systems or even the concept of a "user" in the kernel.
This can and is being implemented on x86. See eros - www.eros-os.org
OpenBSD is still based on the fallacy that affects unix and all clones. That you trust every program you run as much as you trust yourself. Ie security is done at a per account granularity.
Any program you run can do anything to every file you have write access to, and can also leak information by default to anyone on the internet. Not good. This means a very large trusted code base, which is a bad thing. The set of code which need to be trusted (ie the kernel and very few programs) should be as small as possible.
There are some approaches to improving security. Capabilty models look like the best hope for the future. This comment is too small to hold a reasonable explanation - take a look at http://www.eros-os.org .
Don't get me wrong, OpenBSD is a good firewall and general unix server platform, but its security model is limited by posix compliance.
Unfortunately, whilst unix does kick ass in many respects, there are a few deficiencies when it comes to security. Here are a few that come to mind:
/tmp can leak a lot of information.
1) All programs you run are trusted with all files you have access to.
2) All programs are also given a default set of actions they can perform, eg open random connections to the internet. This is nice for leaking information. This can be amelorated via so called posix capabilities. These are more properly called privelege bits as in VMS.
3) Global filesystem. Everyone can see the filesystem.
Chroot may help. Plan 9 style namespaces are better too. Better would be to take the human namespace out of the kernel and only give it to programs that need it.
probably lots of other things. Basically unix was designed when everything you ran on your computer was written by yourself of someone you knew and trusted. And then commercial unix just got featuritis. It would probably not be good to declare it the one true operating system.
As an ex-contractor at the USPTO, i can tell you, they are much more technologically on the ball than they are given credit for. 100mb to the desktop, oc-12's between buildings, multiple redundant internet connections, and with the exception of some old sun systems, they run hp-ux exclusively for their major systems. They are also doing extensive work on building a PKI system, to enable inventors to file and conduct all related transactions online. I'm not saying they are the most open-source friendly, but they DO have quite a setup.
/. poster #104543567
-stax
The submission deadline was two days ago.
Incidentally, if we want secure OS's, it's long past time to give up on UNIX. EROS is the way to go.
www.eros-os.org.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think that's a slightly inappropriate application of Brooks' assertion, as auditing code is a bit different from working on a team programming project.
The former is a task easily done in parallel with little or no intra-personnel communication. The later is something which, as Brooks points out, requires more intra-personnel communication as more personnel is added, until the marginal gain in productivity turns into a loss.
...
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who understand unary, and those who don't.
At what point do you open that bag of bad weed?
You sound like a Windows user who just does not have a clue about what a real operating system should be like, and YES I do realize that you are little troll who just learned just what the Internet is!!!!
One part of trusted is that a system _MUST NOT_ have any underlying bugs. Don't forget that and just go away.
For those of you suggesting that EROS may be the way for DARPA to go, you may be on to something.
Note this statement on the EROS website:
Guess that either means that DARPA's gonna funnel more money into EROS, or that EROS wasn't up to some standard, and they're looking for a replacement.
The no part is that you don't have to have a months-long lead. In fact, the CHATS BAA came out only a few weeks ago. I could tell you the exact date if I weren't too lazy to check my mail logs.
DARPA projects tend to be big, on the order of $500K per year. That means that they expect an effort that involves several people. It also means that they expect fully thought out stuff.
(How do I know? I've participated in lots of DARPA submissions and research projects. I was involved in two potential responses to CHATS, one of which we dropped because we didn't like our own idea. I withdrew from the other because of reasons mildly related to the issue under discussion, mainly that if you get more than $50K per year from DARPA, you have to file a lot of paperwork that my college isn't set up to produce.)
i agree trustedbsd is probably more up their alley, maybe they will be interested in porting the trustedbsd changes to openbsd, since the method the two took towards being secure is different.
Hold on, don't flame me yet. Open Source has the most vulnerable model available, yes. Anybody who knows how to code can put anything they want into the code. Exploits should be abundant, right?
Of course, we all know that there are no exploits for Linux, and dozens of them for Windoze. But what does this mean? I believe that it means Linux has such a great backing in the community that people are watching over each other.
But what happens when some malicious person decides to screw with the code? That's right. Disaster. It's on the horizon. Linux has only been around a few years, and it's long overdue for hackers to install some exploits. I admire DARPA for putting money into this boiling pot, and hope that they can defuse the problem before it gets out of hand. Because once Linux has been shown to be unstable and vulnerable (security wise) then Slashdot is no more...
------
That's just the way it is
Why don't they just use the NSA's secure Linux?
Claims of Linux stability and scalability fall apart rather quickly when its #1 advocacy site is constantly failing,
What basis do you make THIS claim?
The 'byline' is "news for nerds, stuff that matters". Slashdot has a BSD section.
What reasons do you have for thinking *THIS* site is the #1 advocacy site?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Dunno if they ever pursued the project further.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Absolutely true. I didn't mean to impugn the project managers at all. I actually reported directly to a project manager at the ISO, and he was astute at political infighting, but his overwhelming passion was the technology behind his project.
No doubt about it - there are some very smart, very clearheaded people running projects at DARPA.
I also agree with your analysis as to why they'd be delving into Open Source. Many of these program managers are military folks who came in through the military-industrial-govt merry-go-round, but many of them are also essentially hackers who pay attention to things like.. well.. Slashdot.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
DARPA is interested not in current technology, or even next-generation technology. Their mandate is to fund and evaluate what they call "high-risk, high-payoff" projects. They fully expect that most of their projects will fail to achieve their goals. However, they also realize that even those projects that fail will stimulate advances in other, sometimes unforseen areas. Of course, those projects that succeed become the wonder-technologies of tomorrow.
Another thing to keep in mind is that DARPA is a government agency, and as such has a mandate to diseminate their findings as far as possible within the federal government. I actually worked on a liason project with FEMA, where we were trying to help kick-start FEMA's web-based emergency-mitigation effort.
The secondary effect of this mandate to spread the wealth is that it's key for an agency's survival that they be known as the originators of the wealth. That is, when DARPA comes up with something, they sure as hell make sure that every other agency knows it came from DARPA. That way when the budget axe comes along, DARPA isn't first on the chopping block.
So DARPA's desire to fund this project probably has a lot more to do with going beyond what's already been done, and taking the credit for it, than it has to do with acknowledging what's already out there.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The OpenBSD fellas can then write a proposal to modify OpenBDS so that it is a trusted system. This is what DARPA projects are all about.
The way DARPA usually works is on a grant basis. Those people qualified should get together (or stay seperate) and write up a grant. DARPA isn't going to look for grantees. The potential grantees must go to DARPA (with a proposal).
What are you talking about. A bulk of the first-generation open source stuff out there was at least partially funded by DARPA. Get a clue. This is a great opportunity for those with open source experience to put forth a proposal that may fund them for a year or more.
Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
The DARPA program is called Composable High Assurance Trusted Systems (CHATS) which implies that they are interested in Trusted Systems not systems that claim to be secure because a bunch of hackers allegedly have fixed all the buffer overflows. Being "secure" and being a trusted system are completely different things.
Maybe micheal meant to mention TrustedBSD which is attempting to become certified as a Trusted System?
AtheOS (http://www.atheos.cx for the paranoid) is an open-source OS which seems to fit your requirements. While it is still under heavy development, it already supports preemptive multithreading, symetric multiprocessing, protected memory, and, most importantly for you, a band-new, fully integrated GUI with a companion BeOS-like C++ toolkit. It's hardly ready for prime time, but if you've got the skills, check it out and see what you can do to help.
The tools are available! RSRE Malvern now part of DERA (UK DARPA) released them some years ago as an open standard for static testing which is used world wide to verify critical systems. I assume it is on the Net but I can't find the URL.
Remember that DARPA resources can promote development an improvements in operating systems. After all that is in part how BSD came into existence in the first place!
Much of the OpenBSD code came about as a direct or indirect result from DARPA efforts (via CSRG and friends). A fair amount BSD code DARPA helped fund found its was into the GNU and Linux efforts as well. If DARPA wants to fund more research and development let them!
chongo (was here)
If the research was Open Source, then the final product will not end up in the public domain.
This is dead wrong. There is not, nor has there ever been, a conflict between public domain and open source. You are probably confusing it with the GNU (Lesser) Public License, which places the additional requirent of passing on source along with any binaries (or ensuring the availability and knowledge of the source).
how much of a difference would it make to assign each executable its own "user" space - ie, executables have access to whatever the user has access to, so implement an interface framework to always run executables as their own user (unless directed otherwise by trusted real user)? this would seem to define another layer of security, with all the security checks already in place for users.
next implement interface for users to run apps...
could then a simple(?) tmp redirect to "user-app" space take care of the global tmp access problem as well?
does any of this make sense?
[|]
Hah, I'd say it's pretty far from "Microsoft Works".
Regards, Tommy
Government involvement in an open source development project would certainly do a lot to validate the license as a viable alternative to close source projects. DARPA is a pretty interesting group, though. After all, these are the guys who want to bring enhancing exo-armor to the military in a decade or so. Will other, more banal, branches of the government adopt open source soon? Will we see the IRS running their own financial oriented flavor of BSD or even more ironically, the USPTO running an opened source setup. Or are other sectors of the Federale already using open source?
Pax Digitalia
Well, saying that DARPA "invented the Internet" is a bit like saying that Thomas Edison invented the Las Vegas strip. Sure, they funded the techies who built the first part of the network that was to become the Internet, but that's now a miniscule fraction of what people today call "The Net". They had nothing at all to do with the web, for example.
--Lee Daniel Crocker : http://www.etceterology.com My life is in the public domain.
Personally, I think it would be rediculous for them to write their own OS, since Linux/BSD, while they have their flaws, are already pretty well suited to what they're trying to do... the only reason I can see them writing they're own is if they don't want anyone to have the code.
Also notice the Microsoft character for apostrophe (looks like a question mark on my screen).
Slashdot won't let me post that char literally (nice job), so I replaced it with a litaral question mark.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
BSD's not nearly as snappy an acronym as "CHATS," and the government loooooooooooooves snappy acronyms for their toys. ;)
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
The problem with OpenBSD is that it takes years to verify the security of new software releases and integrate them into the distro. Consequently, many of the included packages are old versions that have since been replaced. If DARPA could come up with a methodology that accelerated the pace of verification, they would be very useful to OpenBSD and other OS projects.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
There's never too much research.
___
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Ted Goranson, who has done research under Darpa grants, often laments that there has been amazing little development in operating systems since the 1970s. The files systems of most of todays operating systems remain primitive and little changed from 30 years ago.
Much research has been done and it has lead to many good experimental technologies (file systems that work as databases,instead of being flat). However, these technologies are slow to be incorporated into commercial products, partly because those products labor under the need for backwards compatibility.
Goranson remarked that some of the Darpa funded research on OSs was incorporated into the latest OS from Apple, but I'm not sure of the details.
If something is in the public domain then its not Open Source. Open Source operates under some license, either GPL or GNU or any of a hundred other Open Source licenses that are floating around. Open Source software is copyrighted. Public domain is the opposite, it means no one owns the copyright. Open Source is the exact opposite of the public domain. To say otherwise is to render the phrase meaningless. Think about it. The phrase "Open Source" means the source remains open. If something is in the public domain and I take it and change it then my new version can be proprietary, I can charge money for it. It is not open, nor am I under any obligation to make it open. If Linux was in the public domain, rather than Open Source, then Microsoft could take it and sell their own version of it. They can't do that to Linux because Linux is not in the public domain, rather, someone owns the copyright.
So this is exactly the sort of thing Allchin had in mind when he was ranting about how Free software is unAmerican. In fact, he may have even gotten advance wind of this or parts of it. Thankfully he came out looking like a jackass ahead of time.
I do not have a signature
(It runs under vanilla Linux 2.4 and a Debian package is available, but it is kind of slow and alpha.)
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Didn't you ever read The Mythical Man Month? Adding more people to a project does not necessarily speed it up. Sometimes it even slows it down. Yes, more people doing code audits could audit more packages separately, but you have to take the time to train them all too.
This'll definitely be the wave of the future, I can hear it now:
"Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to CounterStrike 2002: Judgement Day. I'm Al Micheals along with my lovely co-host Killcreek, who knows a thing or two about pointy weapons, err, I mean "pointing" weapons at people.
Tonight's matchup will be Iraq, headed by the "Multikill" master Saddam Hussein versus that tenacious Colt weilding mastermind George W. Bush, who currently leads the United States in terrorist headshots. It's gonna be a winner take all brawl of the century!"
Godlike killing spree's: The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
I want the sources of your Open Source OS. URL please!
Nice try clown. DARPA invented the internet (it used to be ARPAnet).
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Many people do research on reliability and repair costs before buying a new car and will be reluctant to buy a car from a company with no track record. Even VCs give money preferentially to people with track records (most of them won't even talk to you unless you have been referred--it isn't worth their time). If anything, DARPA seems a bit more open to new ideas and new people.
Perhaps some of this research will be done on top of one of the BSD platforms. Perhaps it will be done on Linux. Perhaps some of it will be completely platform independent. But no matter what it will be done on, there are more interesting research questions to ask about open source, secure operating systems, and heterogeneous environments than whether we can fix a few more bugs in BSD or Linux.
Someone should most definatelly inform them about openbsd, linux, beos, macintosh, plan 9, TRS-80, anything is better than what they ahve now...
According to Netcraft that site is running IIS
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
While the various *nix's and BSD's are most likely going to be the major targets of this research, what I'd really love to see come out of this is a new Open Source OS, ala BeOS, that was built on a GUI base and had shell functionality rather than the other way 'round. Not a lot of difference, you say? Sit Granny down in front of BeOS and and a shell prompt and see which one she prefers. Gnome and GTK are a little better, but to make any real changes to the OS, you still have to drop down to shell-level controls. As a graphic artist, this is bit of a dream of mine.... *sigh*... Of course, the problems here are that DARPA is going to be a lot more concerned with things like number-cruching, DB manipulation, and cryptography rather than pixel-pushing or artistic representation. There's also the fact that vast majority of developers who are even moderately going to be interested in this project are going to be *nix hackers. Artistic skill and coding skill are often found in hackers, but for some reason, you seldom see them combined.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
EVERYONE knows that security though obscurity is the best way to go... Hopefully if Microsoft gets it way, this silly waste of tax payers money will soon be illegal, so that they can, err, waste money on XP...
I'm sure on some level this is pretty obvious. However, I guess I've always considered script kiddies as pranksters rather than a threat to national security. Does this scare anyone else?
--
"Sir, I'm scared."
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Anyone that's played Metal Gear Solid knows that DARPA is in the leadership of someone evil... hehe
My mother is a fish.
Instead of Flaming you, like a certain moderator would like to see, I'm going to give you a fair chance to run a quick logical exercise, kay?
Intial Premise:
I write a firewall that requires you to specify which ports should be open initially and how often to rotate them. It also allows you block access of information, in-going and out-going, or IP's you don't specify. Then, I allow to decide the level of access each net-accessing application and external IP may have to your system.*
Concept:
This is all done Raymond style, i.e. open source. Any script-kiddie and his uncle can stare at the source. By your conception, allowing this makes my firewall weak.
Environment:
Now, naturally, only a person with root priveleges can make alterations to the entailment of the firewall, unless otherwise specified, right? That's obviously yes if you have ever used any firewall worth it's weight in electrons.
On top of that, we'll assume you were smart enough to download from MY site, not some third party site, which would put you at risk. You know that already, like most of us, and that's why you're at MY site.
Nothing mentioned so far is abnormal, or even sufficiently outside the realm of what's expected of a super user, i.e. the ability to think.
Paradox:
The script-kiddie knows of some really stupid flaw that I didn't think of, oy, well, that happens***. He/She will assume you will initialize ICQ/ICU on its normal port****. Why do you do that? Same reason you wrote this post to begin with. Anywho, they create a portal string through ICQ/ICU. You're not tracking the IP movement because of the pre-mentioned reason. Ditto for why you don't cut&rotate for additional IP-links. Now, how's this script-kiddie going to affect the firewall? He doesn't have the localhost IP or root priveleges.
You're thinking, "But he got inside, he can do stuff!" NO HE CAN'T!!! Where have you been!? He doesn't have root priveleges! He has NO user priveleges! THIS IS LINUX!**
Conclusion:
Well written, open-source software is more than secure enough*, especially on the right system**. Even if the software has a flaw***, a capable user can take extra precautions to increase it's ability****.
Comment:
Hack your own box, but, whatever happens to you will nolonger be my fault:P
I will avoid saying, "Class dismissed," only because it's used ATLEAST once a week on Slashdot.
Besides, I now have lots of time, because I'm on strike due to an anti-semetic comment in, I think, The Mandrake article. As long as that's up, I have all sorts of extra time to kvetch an jibber. Actually, I'm thinking about making "Dotslash: The Crossfire of the Geeks" text adventure...well, slashdot-facade, but that's all; it'll be like that old commodore 64 game "Portal" but less plot and more "Nonsense", see Jon's Humorix Toys at i-want-a-website.com/about-linux and yes, Jon likes dashes very much.
Hmm, I guess I will now be intergrating Nonsense; feh, now Jon will want a copy before I release it.
I hope this was informative to you "Open Source Isn't Secure" types. In fact, just to mention about BSD for a moment: The reason why it seems constantly out of date is because it is constantly being tested for those "flaws" and insecurities. I compliment the effort, but it does cause the appearance of antiquation. Sure, their 3.0 compiler is more stable than your 4.0, but it lacks features and advancement. Their 4.6 firewall is more powerful than your 6.2, but it's not as customizable or as scalable. However, if you would consider OpenBSD, or any for that matter, you would have little in the ways of worries and only the occasional woe. And, every once in awhile...you can get an impressive application that makes us GNU-ists stop and say, "Woah!"
^_^
Now...about that anti-semetic AnonCow, could someone do something...NOW-ish?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
..."This program will fundamentally change the existing approach to development and acquisition of high assurance trusted operating systems technology by advancing the security functionality, security services, and the state of assurance in current open-source operating systems and developing a long-term architectural framework for future trusted operating systems."
Can you see it? Someday, all transactions on digital networks will require secure p2p operation such as this would provide. Meaning, that companis would only do business with you if they can be assured you won't take advantage of them.
This would be a very marketable product in the future. Wouldn't the MPAA love it when all television sets in the future run this future OS? It would assure them that your TV is who it says it is, and would make sure those silly kids aren't trying to record a TV shows... God forbid.
- Never Undrestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups... -
One reason that commercial companies are reluctant to use OSS is that they do not like to relinquish control to unknown elements. We all know the standard rebuttals to this point, but the military could be worse.
The military and security agencies are incompatibvle in terms of ethos with the OSS atmosphere. Will they give outside developers, like Joe Bloggs from Birmingham, UK, or Pu Kong Yon from Bangkok, the same access to internal information and the same time of day as external developers?
I fear , very much, that there could be difficult times ahead in this project. I am hedging my bets as to the outcome.
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-
I think of little else but you.
Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.
Maybe someone shuld just tell Michael about EROS, a GPL'd x86 capabilities OS currently under development.
Read more on capabilities and why they're important to OS security. A capabilities system is relatively resistant to a lot of the big security issues that plague other types of systems. For example, even if buffer overruns do occur, the damage that can be done is very limited. This is a really cool project.
Yeah, that way Microsoft can steal all the work, compromise it in their usual way, and call it their own. This is yet another project that needs the "innovation killing" attributes of GPL in order to protect the consumers from the chokehold of Microsoft.
There is only one thing I don't understand. When EXACTLY does Solid Snake sneak in to save Kenneth Baker, the DARPA Chief?
:)
Or maybe I'm playing video games too much...
Fuzzy Knights: New RPG Strips Tuesday and Friday!:
http://www.fuzzyknights.com
Can you understand what you read? The guy was making the point that OpenBSD developers don't say that it is the end-all and be-all of security. He was making a comment on what the editor said not making a negative comment on OpenBSD. Why am I responding to an idiot?
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
that's the point, anon!
Billygoat Gruff III - killing trolls DEAD since 1616!
Too bad that DARPA INVENTED the Internet! Back when they were still ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). Now they've become DARPA by throwing a Defense in front of the ARPA.
So as Mr. T would say, "Cut that jibba-jabba, fool! Internet wuzn't no creation of the free-market!"
Billygoat Gruff III - killing trolls DEAD since 1616!
DARPA is trying to advance what's already available - and advances in security would be great. I suspect they will be able to make advances, since they're planning to spend $10 million on the winning proposals. As has been noted, OpenBSD is not a perfect solution - its packages are often quite old and it has many functionality limits (e.g., no support for SMP). It also doesn't meet the principle of "least privilege" - root is still all-powerful, programs can do anything their owners can, etc.
The deadline is soon for those interested in submitting a proposal. The full proposal (all copies) must be submitted in time to reach DARPA by 4:00 PM (U.S. Eastern Time) Monday, March 5, 2001, in order to be considered; it CANNOT be sent by email or fax (they REQUIRE PHYSICAL COPIES).
People interested in submitting a proposal should also read the Proposer Information Pamphlet (PIP), which isn't easy to find unless you know where it is.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)