Security and the $100 Laptop

gondaba writes "The One Laptop Per Child project is actively recruiting hackers to help crack the security model of the $100 laptop to avoid the obvious risks associated with what will effectively be the largest computing monoculture in history. From the article: 'The key design goal, Krstic explained, is to avoid irreversible damage to the machines. The laptops will force applications to run in a "walled garden" that isolates files from certain sensitive locations like the kernel. "If we discover vulnerabilities, the security model must hold up enough that even a machine that is unpatched won't be easily exploitable. This gives us a bit of diversity to avoid the monoculture trap," he added.'"

Comments

Onepage 'Printable'

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=19121 0,00.asp

Biggest Monoculture

[Doc Ruby]

The many millions of SymbianOS mobile "phones" is the largest computing monoculture in the world. Much more essential for the world's daily operation than these cool kids' PCs, and tied directly to the wallets, by the minute, of most people with any money.

Re:Biggest Monoculture

[Bender0x7D1]

You missed the point that it is identical software AND hardware.

Sure, there are more installs of Windows XP, but they aren't all running on the exact same hardware. Same goes for SymbianOS.

Also, these laptop don't assume that someone is attached to a high-speed network where they can download patches every few weeks. If someone hacks your phone, or a vulnerability in Windows is found, they push a patch out - OLPC wants these to be secure from day 1. (Or at least as secure as possible.)

Colossal Waste

[Anonymous Coward]

OCPC is a massive waste of resource, you can tell because it smells Utopian while disconnected from reality.

Re:MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL

[EPAstor]

This issue is being worked on. As I understand it, the closed wireless firmware is planned to be completely replaced in the next revision of the laptop.

Re:$230 laptop

[paintswithcolour]

Actually no.

Jobs offered OS X for free, it was turned down because the developers wanted an open source OS.

Re:Step in the Wrong Direction?

[geekoid]

no.

Giving people tools so they can help themselves is the best thing you can do. This, like all comuters, is just a tool.
Making someone dependent on hand outs is not the solution.

Re:please...

[Monsuco]

When the parts for laptops get cheap enough that someone could manufacture a $100 laptop, *then the market will be flooded with $100 laptops*. There are a dearth of hardware manufacturers out there already competing to make the cheapest laptop they can.

It is cheap by leaving out stuff like a hard drive, and instead has 512 MB of flash (though I think some models might have 1GB). It will lack a CD drive. It will have a very slow 366 Mhz AMD Geode processor, so that it can run without fans and wont use much power. It has a tiny display, that might work for writting documents, but giving presentations or watching movies would probably not work. It doesn't have a particularly powerful battery, though because it has a small display, no HDD to spin, and a slow processor, it will stay up a long time on one charge. It has 128 MB of RAM. It lacks a PCI slot. It does have an SD slot, a special "mesh networking" wifi card, 3 USB 2.0 ports, an SD slot, speakers, a microphone, and of course, it is very durable because it has been ruggedized and because it has no moving parts. It is perfect for schools were students will probably do little more than type on a word processor (probably something like Abiword), research, maybe art, and simple stuff like that. You or I would probably not want it.

I do think they should sell the laptops commercially for $200-$300 though so that people who might want to help the project could purchase one for that price and in doing so pay for 2 free laptops for poor children. I also think that if they ever start mass producing them, they shouldn't be limited to just the poor nations. I think schools in the US might like the idea of being able to check out these to students to help with school work and stuff, especially in inner city areas.

My only question is why is Gnome used as the desktop? Gnome is a great desktop environment, but it seems like these machines, having only 128 MB of ram and no way to do swap partions (it would ruin a flash drive to use it for swap) it seems like fluxbox, XFce, or blackbox might be better. I realize the gnome is modified, but still.

Re:Novell's AppArmor

[invisik]

Yes, it is opensourced from Novell.

Here's a link to the Novell Forge: http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/project/?app armor

SELinux is out there too, but quite a bit more difficult to configure, even as a distro. AppArmor can be added to any system you have easily enough.

-m