One Laptop Per Child Security Spec Released

juwiley writes "The One Laptop Per Child project has released information about its advanced security platform called Bitfrost. Could children with a $100 laptop end up with a better security infrastructure than executives using $5000 laptops powered by Vista? 'What's deeply troubling — almost unbelievable — about [Unix style permissions] is that they've remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today...In 1971, this might have been acceptable...We have set out to create a system that is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market.'"

Comments

Re:$5000 laptop? Pulleeze!!

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

What executive, or any human being do you know is using a $5000 laptop? Even the most hardcore geeks I know spend only up to about $2k for the best laptops.

Hardcore geek != executive.

You've obviously never met an executive, they don't have the slightest problem splashing out (from the company account) well upwards of $5000. They think they're worth it.

Re:Sand dunes

[Edward Kmett]

Read more closely.

The document said that it was not possible for the application to request P_DOCUMENT_RO access and network access simultaneously during installation.

But it also said that it was perfectly OK for a user to go in and explicitly grant P_NET access via the GUI to an application with P_DOCUMENT_RO access, thereby giving you an application that is able to read your images and mass upload them to teh interweb, but only to those users who know enough to explicitly use the security interface.

Also the OLPC or local government could issue a signed XO package that offered that functionality to younger children.

RTFA - this is not DRM or Trusted Computing

[schwaang]

That means that in order to execute any such programs on their OLPC, those programs are going to need to be "signed" by an "authority" before they can be executed.

Umm, NO.

If you RTFA, they specifically designed the security model so that children could write their own apps which can do *anything*. But they set up some defaults (which can be overridden) to protect the system.

What they are aiming at is a way to set sensible limits per-program, at install time:

The crux of the problem lies in the assumption that any program executing on a system on the user's behalf should have the exact same abilities and permissions as any other program executing on behalf of the same user.

So at install time, a package (they call it a bundle IIRC) has a list of specific rights that the program will need in order to do its job. If the bundle doesn't ask for a certain right at install time and tries to use it later (because, say, it was maliciously modified), it will be denied.

If an app *is* signed by OLPC, it can have any right that it specifically asks for at install time. Otherwise, there are some rules about what subsets of rights are allowable together (i.e. asking for certain rights will exclude certain others by default). But again, the whole thing can be overridden.

This is nothing like Trusted Computing or DRM. It's more like a wrapper around SELinux (I don't know if that's actually how they implemented it).