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A Secure OS For the Dalai Lama?
Jamyang (Greg Walton) writes "I am editor of the Infowar Monitor and co-author of the recent report, Tracking Ghostnet. I have been asked by the Office of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama (OHHDL) and the Tibetan Government in Exile (TGIE) to offer some policy recommendations in light of the ongoing targeted malware attacks directed at the Tibetan community worldwide. Some of the recommendations are relatively straightforward. For example, I will suggest that OHHDL convene an international Board of Advisers, bringing together some of the brightest minds in computer and international security to advise the Tibetans, and that the new Tibetan university stands up a Certified Ethical Hacking course. However, one of the more controversial moves being actively debated by Tibetans on the Dharamsala IT Group [DITG] list, is a mass migration of the exile community (including the government) to Linux, particularly since all of the samples of targeted malware collected exploit vulnerabilities in Windows. I would be very interested to hear Slashdot readers opinions on this debate here." (More below.)
Jamyang continues: "Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment here: in the short term, moving to a platform that is perhaps less familiar to the attacker provides considerable relief, but it is essentially less difficult to write exploits for Mac OS/Linux than it is for Windows, given the many anti-exploitation mechanisms Microsoft has embedded in the last years, so in the long run, if the attackers want your data, the entire move is moot. People should choose a platform based on their productivity requirements instead of purely security. Furthermore, most of the web servers broken into during these attacks (to be used as command and control servers) were not Windows, but Linux. What do you think?
(While I have the floor I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug two initiatives where Slashdot readers can directly help the Tibetan tech community, either through sharing your expertise or your cash! Firstly, one of the obstacles to migrating to Linux for a Tibetan speaker is the lack of decent Tibetan font — can you help? Secondly, Avaaz is raising funds for projects that will help End The Blackout in Tibet, including a proposal to support the deployment of Psiphon's circumvention network. Thanks, or in Tibetan, thuk.je.che!"
(While I have the floor I'd also like to take this opportunity to plug two initiatives where Slashdot readers can directly help the Tibetan tech community, either through sharing your expertise or your cash! Firstly, one of the obstacles to migrating to Linux for a Tibetan speaker is the lack of decent Tibetan font — can you help? Secondly, Avaaz is raising funds for projects that will help End The Blackout in Tibet, including a proposal to support the deployment of Psiphon's circumvention network. Thanks, or in Tibetan, thuk.je.che!"
First off, yes, that is a single sentence.
Secondly, exactly who is it who says (or can demonstrate) that cracking a Mac or Linux box is easier than a Windows box? My experience is exactly the opposite.
As opposed to the anti-exploitation frameworks which were present in UNIX systems from the moment they were conceived? and continually updated since? You've been listening to too much Microsoft advertising if you think they're Superior. (Competitive? Maybe. Superior? Not a chance).
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Not encryption or top secret stuff.
Any of the major linux distros should work fine., unicode tibetan is supported.
I think you mean a Tibet of equal or greater value.
First of all, converting the Dalai Lama to Linux is about the coolest IT project I've ever heard of, so congratulations
That aside, there are practical considerations and there are philosophical ones you'll want to consider. Practically speaking, no platform is 100% secure. Linux has historically been more secure than Windows. MS has made a lot of progress in the last decade or so.
The question is, do you prefer the closed-source approach or the open-source one? Would you rather the problems be hidden away, or laid out for all to find? In the closed-source scenario, knowledge of exploits may be less common, but that cuts two ways. Less attackers will be aware of an exploit, but less defenders will be aware of it as well. That may well result in the exploits that do occur being much more severe.
Beyond those practical considerations, which approach fits better with the values of the Tibetan community and the Dalai Lama in particular? In my mind, open source is the embodiment of non-attachment.
Monkeytreats
A Secure OS For the Dalai Lama?
I have absolutely no idea what Slashdot will say to a question like that.
Most of all, make sure that anyone that uses a computer is aware of the risks. Even more sure with higher clearance levels.
If it were up to me to decide, I would go for the broadest possible range of OSes: Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix, BSD, BeOS....
The reason is simple: if an outside attacker can't predict what they will meet, it's much harder to get in.
And if you can get the various OSes to masquerade as each other when replying to outside queries, so much the better: an attacker could be trying to use known Mac vulnerabilities to enter a machine that from the outside looks and behaves like a Mac, but actually runs Windows or Linux.
Call him Dalai Lama. What's with all these his holy, etc.? Do we call the pope his holy whatsit? Or the English Queen? Even The One is simply The One.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
These are some of the best comments on here so far because they are underscored by the idea that ALL of your possible choices are going to have vulnerabilities.
While others debate the security records and architectures of various operating systems (and some may be better choices overall), only an idiot would claim that such-and-such a system is invulnerable, particularly when the attack is specifically targeted at you.
The sarcastic response would be "try Red Flag Linux" but the serious response would be to look at a fully open *nix variant such as Debian, or one of the BSDs. I'm not familiar with any of the BSDs but I'm aware that security is a high priority with them. My reluctance with BSD is the lack of "rich entertainment" (for want of a better description) applications easily installable, which won't be an issue (I'd imagine) for the needs of the Dhali Lama.
For the BSD fans, this is NOT meant to flame, just to point out that for users who expect "modern" or "proprietary" stuff like Flash, mp3 support Linux is a better option. If you don't need those type of features then BSD is well worth a look. Any new OS will need new learning, in that regard BSD or Linux makes no difference.
And each one with its own set of vulnerabilities.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Actually, designing a Tibetan font is rather difficult. Tibetan letters combine in complicated ways (somewhat like Devanagari, but worse), meaning that it is either necessary to produce very sophisticated rendering software/info or necessary to create a large number of pre-combined glyphs.
And failing the thousands of monks having nothing better to do than to spend hours with FontForge, they could just import (read: infringe upon copyright) the fonts they like under Windows and place them into Linux.
The original notions put forward do mirror my initial concerns when moving from Windows to Linux. Among those concerns were a good Japanese language interface and input method, good fonts and printer support. The first two were addressed with some heavy pushing in that direction with SCIM and whatever it was that came before it... then it became as good or better than Windows. The other was just opening up some man pages or simply giving it a try... turned out not to be difficult in the slightest.
Moving to a different operating system is a seemingly daunting task to those who have never done it before and they are required, then, to think of computing in terms of what you need to do and how you might accomplish it... not something most people are accustomed to thinking about. (The same can be said about moving from Word Perfect to Microsoft Word and it was a BIG deal!)
Moving away from Windows is simply necessary judging by the kinds of attacks described. Another option might be Deep Freeze... has that been defeated yet?
One thing is for certain: one should not be stopped from performing a necessary task merely because it is "difficult." Just do it. If it seems impossible, give it a try anyway. But moving the religious leader and all his followers to Linux is definitely a workable thing to do.
Hardly any exploits at all.
Oh you wanted a USABLE OS? Well you'll need to tell me what it's going to be used for.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This entire article smells like flamebait to me. I'm going to sit back and watch it burn.
Power does not corrupt - power attracts the corrupt.
I know purists will hate this, but another solution would be to create a standardized way to display tibetan without the letter combination. Just like japanese has a more or less standardized process for displaying japanese words in the roman alphabet, a way to do something simliar in Tibetan would be useful. Spending a ton of time modifying all western software to use advanced typography to display Tibetan "correctly" could well backfire. The end result would be the effort required would result in few programs being translated at all, and another language becoming the defacto standard for computer savvy Tibetans. That road leads to youth with minimal skills in their own cultural language.
---One of the ways that I manage my systems is to create a zone where hackers may go, and not go.
The only way to guarantee that is by an air gap. If data can travel in both directions, it can gone to.
---For example, I use a good firewall. That firewalls is allowed to communicate to another firewall. Between the two firewalls is my take down zone. This means if they happen to break through the firewall all they will get are servers that can be taken down anyways.
---These take down servers are virtual machine based. So if a machine goes down, who shives a ghit because you just shut down the VM, copy the old one and restart it.
Lets assume what you say is correct. First, what protections do you have vs the hypervisor running the VMs? How do you prevent starvation of resources by de-fragmenting ill formed packets? If you don't "correct broken packets", then what prevents a fragrouter-like attack right through your network?
As per your answer of shutting down and reloading, that is not an answer to bad rules that can almost never work, for they will persist until you fix them. Then, when you bring them up, they will be hopped over again.
(trimmed gobbledegook about unhackable firewalls)
You can think that you have an unhackable setup. Fine. Perhaps you will investigate what I said, and might take action to test what I claim. But aside that you are probably just as vulnerable as the rest. All that has to really be done is your border router feed bad updates to machines requesting OS updates. Of course, crypto signatures will catch that they don't sign, but that's where we use old packages with known vulnerabilities. I'm sure in your course of duty you don't check the package date, nor do most update programs. Or, perhaps somethings watching for passwords on your external firewall. There's a nice tool called dsniff that does just that.
In the real world, if you want an unhackable network, you build the network with no external connections. It's as simple as that. The military understands that. Power companies understand that. Industrial control designers understand that. If you want to have a facade that you somehow can super-firewall so that no hacker can get in, so be it. Whatever you put on the internet can potentially end up everywhere. Just look at Wolverine Workprint or multitudes of sex tapes or other media. I'm sure there's some Presidential Helicopter schematics going around in Islamic areas right now, according to my sources.
Just look at one of the BSD's they have a track record for being secure and no messy cert issues like debian had. Also you might want to consider that the OS isnt the only attack vector.
Mashing everything into the roman alphabet isn't necessarily the best thing. The Japanese don't use romaji at all in any real contexts. So it's a more complex script? Make sure Unicode supports it. Update the rendering engines to handle it. No sense in forcing people to give up part of their language just to use software.
In case you hadn't noticed, English was already the worldwide de-facto standard for computing. It isn't computing professionals these programs are localized (properly) for in most cases. Also, changing your society to match the capabilities of some software is -always- the wrong way.
ASLR in Linux is a novelty and usually not the default. Just like selinux is a joke.
Yes, and there's a reason for that: the Linux community apparently doesn't want them and doesn't find them useful. If enough people wanted them, they'd be on by default in the major distributions.
To bad MS has figured out how to implement it consistently.
Yes, and that pretty much tells you what's wrong with Microsoft: it's a bunch of managers deciding top down what security mechanisms Windows should use, and then they direct their masses of programmers to implement that "consistently", and finally it gets shipped with the next major release, whether users want it or not.
The trouble with the Microsoft approach is that nobody in the world is smart enough to design security correctly in such a top-down way. Based on a bunch of papers half a dozen years ago, Microsoft may have jumped onto the ASLR bandwagon, but that doesn't make it a good security solution.
And this top-down, planned approach is the reason Microsoft keeps screwing up and why they need to spend so much money developing software that other people develop with a fraction of the investment. It sounds good on paper, and control-freaks love it, but it simply isn't a good way of creating a complex software system.
Remind me again please which OS the botnet runs on? Thank you.
MS embeds all kinds of code from third parties. Drivers, libraries etc etc. It has been shown time and time again that there are huge security holes in MS code, holes that are actively exploited. It ain't for nothing that when the NSA wanted to make a proof of concept secure OS they choose linux.
You got a point, how can you trust any OS if you have not checked the code. Where you take a dive of the deep end is that you then suggest that MS can be trusted to check the code for you. Not trusting say Red Hat blindly that they checked all the code is sensible, trusting Microsoft that they checked all theirs is just plain silly. If they had, they wouldn't have so many bugs. And your fate in your goverment is bordering on the insane.
Anyway, that same goverment checks linux code. So either both are to be trusted or neither is.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... you need to choose a competent admin. Remember, security is a process, not a product ...
gd
when the Chinese invaded. He has consistently supported democracy, equality, and human rights.
The Dalai Lama may "consistently" espouse such views in public, but his behavior outside the (western) public eye tells a different story. Even for Tibetans now residing on free soil in places such as the US, UK, Germany, and Switzerland, he behaves as a dictator-for-life and demands that they follow his decrees in order to receive travel papers, work permits, food and living allowances, etc. His regime unapologetically practices religious apartheid. Unbelievable? Check out the information and first-hand accounts provided by http://www.westernshugdansociety.org/ and make up your own mind.
It's not about the OS. I've had Windows servers remain safe for years, and Linux servers be subverted in days.
Security is an eco-system, not an OS, for example:
- granting and removing access rights, in a very conservative and up-to-date manner
- keeping an audit trail of every access
- locking confidential info so it never gets onto a laptop's HD
- having backups
- securing every cog and wheel of the system: client PCs, routers, servers, backups, admin stations...
- locking down the weakest point: users (weak passwords, copied files, printouts, espionage...)
- and many more issues.
In the big picture, the OS is fairly irrelevant. It's only a very small part of the whole system. The whole "we need to be safe - let's switch to Linux" is wrong and shows a tremendous lack of understanding of the issues.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Combining letters aren't an intrinsic necessity in any language, they are an affectation and a mechanism for keeping people illiterate. European languages used to have them and got rid of them because the only purpose they serve is to restrict access to reading and writing.
Tibetan can be written just fine in an alphabetic style. It would be prudent for the Dalai Lama to make that the standard for the Tibetan community.
What I would try and convince the people of who you are working with is that security is a continuum running from almost totally secure to almost completely insecure (to the extent that there is such a thing), so in reality pretty much no OS will be completely secure. What is interesting, I think, is that usability is inversely related to security. If you imagine that an OS which wouldn't allow you to write to the disk and wouldn't allow you on the internet you can imagine that when security is that high you'll get almost no usability.
with that in mind I would advocate trading a lot of usability for security - you could have an encrypted disk and run a terminal with something like nano and lynx installed - this would be pretty damn secure especially if you were running it on fairly secure hardware (did Intel ever fix the security issue that theo de raat was talking about in the Core 2s?) with something like OpenBSD as the core. This, I think would allow you (after some modifications) to allow pretty robust security. A downside though is that I'm pretty sure you might be compelled to run in English as I'm not sure how good the language support is for this sort of thing (with no GUI I can't imagine it would be great). Even so, I think if your data security is important (and lets face it, in this situation it probably is) then the trade-off might be worth while.
Of course, perhaps the more gaping hole in security is the user themselves, who could always reveal all the information they had to anyone... XKCD said it better - http://xkcd.com/538/
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/ has nothing to do with China, despite persistent allegations to the contrary. The organization was formed by western Buddhists and some brave Tibetans who were willing to defy the Dalai Lama at great risk to themselves and their families.
The issue under protest is not political...it is merely religious freedom. The Dalai Lama has cracked down on Tibetans who wish to practice in their pure lineage rather than the mish-mash lineage created solely by the Dalai Lama, in an attempt to unify Tibetans' religious practices in order to maintain control over them for political purposes.
How ironic that the Dalai Lama publicly laments that people within Tibet no longer have the freedom to practice, yet he interferes with that same freedom in Tibetan monasteries and enclaves throughout the world.
There's plenty of information there.
Pictures of posters refusing entry or service to those who defy the Dalai Lama's decrees: http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/reports/untouchables-shocking-posters-in-monastery/
Documentation of the oaths exiled Tibetans must sign (swearing to shun anyone who defies the ban) in order to obtain travel papers, housing, food assistance, etc.: http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/en/reports/oaths/
Secretly recorded speeches by the Dalai Lama detailing the religious ban: http://www.westernshugdensociety.org/en/news/speeches-endorsing-the-ban/
An AlJazeera investigative report shot in India: http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/peopleandpower/2008/09/200893014344405483.html (linked to from the site)
And there's a lot more!
It's not a question of purists. There aren't that many people in the world who read Tibetan. So you'd more likely do harm than good this way. Furthermore, Tibetan Unicode support is very good, so there's no need to redesign the type system. For instance, let's see what happens here:
à½-à½à¾à½à¼à½à½à½¦à¼à½-à½'à½à¼à½£à½à½à½¦à¼
Oh, the humanity. Apparently slashdot is not unicode-safe.