Slashdot Mirror
Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS
An anonymous reader writes "Several newspapers have reported that DRDO (the defence R&D organization of the Indian military) is planning to create an OS. The need for this arose due to the cyber security concerns facing India and that all [conventional] operating systems are made outside India. About 50 professionals in Bangalore and New Delhi are expected to start work on this operating system." At least one of the linked articles says the new OS, though home-grown, would run Windows software.
I know this is obvious, but come on...
Seriously, why not take a *BSD or Linux OS release and do a full source code review on it? It will take a lot less effort than creating anything from scratch, plus they can submit bug reports and code fixes back to the corresponding opensource projects. (Everybody wins!!!) Any mature OS would not be plagued by bugs that commonly occur in large new code bases. After reviewing and approving the OS, they can simply track changes of future releases in order to maintain trust.
Don't use Binary Blobs, I agree, absolutely, if you care at all about your Sovereignty. Get the source tree for an already very well secured OS like, say, OpenBSD, or perhaps Linux (though OBSD is, I believe, generally developed with practices that encourage better security - less focus on feature, more on audits and exploit finding/fixing). Have your 'trusted' developers from your nation go over every line of code, to make sure no trojans/backdoors/intentional exploits were added, then build it all yourself.
Of course, there is still always the possibility you have a hacked C compiler. Man, I can't remember the name of it now, but sometime in, I think it was the 80's, someone made a pretty famous presentation/paper about putting a self-perpetuating trojan into a compiler. You could give the compiler source code, and the binary of the compiler to the 'mark', but you could completely remove the exploit from the source code, as long as the exploit was coded to compile itself into subsequent builds of the compiler; that is, the binary was infected, but the source was not, but it didn't matter since the infected binary could build a copy of itself into the next build of the compiler. The exploit could then additionally do something like whenever it built other binaries or libraries, add some exploit code to them as well.
I suppose you need your own people to do a dis-assembly of the compiler to verify that. Or, build your own assembler in machine language, then build your own compiler with your assembler. Once you've done that, if you have a trusted compiler, and verified source code, you don't really lose security by using Open Source. If anything, it'll *probably* be more secure, if it's popular enough to have a lot of devs analyzing it and fixing problems.
Simple reason: "Everybody wins" is not an option in real wars.
Of course, there is still always the possibility you have a hacked C compiler. Man, I can't remember the name of it now, but sometime in, I think it was the 80's, someone made a pretty famous presentation/paper about putting a self-perpetuating trojan into a compiler. You could give the compiler source code, and the binary of the compiler to the 'mark', but you could completely remove the exploit from the source code, as long as the exploit was coded to compile itself into subsequent builds of the compiler; that is, the binary was infected, but the source was not, but it didn't matter since the infected binary could build a copy of itself into the next build of the compiler. The exploit could then additionally do something like whenever it built other binaries or libraries, add some exploit code to them as well.
That would be Ken Thompson.
What the fuck? A government checking the code it runs on computers with sensitive data is "national socialist"? You think the United States government doesn't do this on CIA and DOD computers? Or are you a nut against building roads?
We're talking about doing this only for government computers used for sensitive government data.