I have been a member of project JOS for nearly two years, and have
witnessed many conversations (either through these mailing lists or on
the wiki) regarding security on JOS; platform security, higher-level
security, cryptography and authentication, and other details.
Many times someone has argued that JOS is an OS targeted at end users.
This means that someone can use JOS without having to be a developer.
Taken on a further step, JOS has to be developed *and* supported in such
a way that these end users can feel comfortable installing it.
It is obvious that installation, runtime and upgrade must be easy, and
very automated, so that they can be accomplished by people that do not
know how JOS works, nor can find out how it works by looking at the
source code (or looking at it in general, for that matter).
Apart from that, I would like to bring to your attention another matter
that should interest end users, and that's his (her) on-line privacy. By
privacy, at least at an OS level, I would mean the capability of a user
choosing who will have what access to the resources on his JOS system.
I have knowledge of two basic OS's which fail, at various levels, to
accomplish this: Linux and Windows.
Linux is very often found on a multi-user system, which means that a
user is at risk of attacks he cannot know about, and cannot counter. A
user on a remote Linux system is as vulnerable as his administrator is,
which is not secure enough: he does not control the security of his
system. On JOS, given the use of Java, virtual little sandboxes can be
created, so that each user can control the security of his own
resources, no matter what mistakes someone else might make.
Windows generally sucks, and being an NT user (not my choice) I have had
to install tens of components to secure (really?) my ports, disks, keys,
etc. That is unacceptable for an OS: security should be controlled by
the OS' security subsystem, not by user applications filling up ports
and holes here and there.
That is why I wish to point out the importance of "advertising" JOS as
not only a secure OS, but a very private one. The workstation, server,
distributed network node and game machine tend to co-exist in systems,
and I can't see why they will cease in the future; thus, it is best that
a user knows he is - and feels - that his privacy is respected by the OS
and the network it is connected to.
--
"Though this be madness, yet there is method in't."
- William Shakespeare
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