When it comes to security, every desktop computer operating system is fundamentally flawed. Why? Because any software you run has the same permissions that you do. Anything you can do, they can do too — whether you want that or not.
Speaking at the AusCERT conference on Monday, Ivan Krstic, director of security architecture for the One Laptop per Child project, says the computing industry relies on “utterly obsolete concepts and assumptions” and has “massively failed when it comes to desktop security”.
The way modern desktop security works is by relying on the user to make informed and sensible choices on things they don’t understand.
The early personal firewall software was a classic example:
A dialogue would pop up and say ‘Hi, we’ve intercepted this packet with this TCP sequence number and these flags set, and SYN and FIN are both on, and here are the destination ports and the source ports and here is a hex dump of the packet. Allow or deny? What do you think?’. Who is that protecting? It’s protecting me, but I don’t need that kind of protection in the first place.
The Apple Blog was sarcastic when they reported Krstic’s speech — I suspect because arrogant OS X users think security issues don’t apply to them — so I posted a response…
Continue reading “Who do you trust? Everyone!”