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Security and the $100 Laptop

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-about-the-single-girl dept.

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.'"

3 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Why hack a machine that will have no data on it? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Well, other than to build a zombie network I guess- but I can't imagine anybody being interested in some Libyan child's schoolwork.

    --
    SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
  2. Could actually be a problem by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not for MS but for MS's competitors. Can't really claim MS is a monopoly anymore if there's 100 million systems running a non-MS OS. That means that they are free to do as they please, for the most part, when it comes to locking people out of their OS. Most anti-competitiveness statues only affect monopolies. Companies that face competition are generally allowed to be as anti-competitive as they like.

  3. virtualize the applications by xzvf · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Run each application in it's own virtual machine. Xen has a low enough overhead and is clean code. Browser compromised - reload from know good source.