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

No data, but quite a processing network

[Inhibit]

That's true. The fact that the machines don't have appreciably large hard drives, heavy processing power, and won't have constant high-bandwith internet connections might do a lot for them.

On the other hand, there are going to be a *lot* of these machines. So I suppose they might make a tempting target "just because" or simply for bulk processing.