Saturday, February 10, 2007

BitFrost: New Security System

This Wired article High Security for $100 Laptop is a watered down version of this summary of the full spec of BitFrost. The One Laptop per Child project is trying to build $100 laptops for the purpose of getting them to every child on earth to help education. BitFrost is the security platform of the project and it's pretty interesting. The laptop will run a version of Linux and

"The XO will premiere a security system that takes a radical approach to computer protection. For starters, it does away with the ubiquitous security prompts so familiar to users of Windows and antivirus software...'How can you expect a 6-year-old to make a sensible decision when 40-year-olds can't?'" This big difference is that each app runs with a limited set of permissions and not the full set of permissions that the user has. This is an old concept in computers but not common in todays machines.

An example of why this is good is the Windows Solitare program. The OS gives Solitare permission to do whatever the user can, access the network, write to the disk, use the camera, anything. And why should Solitare be able to do these things? What if some hacker found a way to exploit it. By not giving it these permissions, even if it was hacked, it wouldn't be able to accomplish much.

There are more details in the spec, but if it's successful, let's hope the major OS's adopt some of the notions.

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