On Oct 24, 2006, at 12:16 AM, Nakashima wrote:
On Sunday, October 22, 2006, at 09:14 AM, Tim Newsham wrote:
Would the system be safer if it was all on a CD and there was no
hard drive?
In a way. The system could still be attacked and used by
attackers to
stage attacks against other machines, but without a way to save any
persistent state, you'd get back to a "clean" state by just rebooting
(barring any bios hacks or using USB storage for persistent state,
which
some CD based systems do).
Of course, if an attacker could get into the system before the
reboot,
they'll be able to get in again after the reboot, as the system will
be essentially the same.
So, not a perfect solution, but is it better than the current one?
Only if your software has no bugs, or you're willing to reboot more
often than the mean time to next infection.
jim
Would you be able to make a CD based system fast enough for a
basic user?
Yes.
What are the chances of the FOSS community taking this on? Given
what's available in terms of hardware and software, would this be a
difficult thing to do?
its been done. See any recent LiveCD/Knoppix exercise.
