On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 5:24 PM, Hari Kurup <[email protected]> wrote:
> <http://www.cio.com/article/print/496902> > Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer at BT, scoffed at > Google's promise. "It's an idiotic claim," Schneier wrote in an e-mail. > "It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible -- not > an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the > 2+2=3 kind of impossible -- to create an operating system that is immune > to viruses." > I would tend to disagree and to agree with Bruce. Unless I am wrong, I have not heard of Viruses for MacOS, *BSD family of OSes and UNIX OSes in general, Linux. There is a tendency to find bugs and security holes in programs run on these OSes, but the underlying OS is pretty secure (not 100%). One trend that I believe we have all noticed is the creation of viruses for expensive commercial products. Adobe has been the latest of applications to have viruses targeted at them. i am yet to see a virus targeted to OpenOffice. The OS installed on my laptop has the capability of locking the OS down to the point where if something is not installed, not even root will install it unless you drop down the security level to a level where root is allowed to install and run something globally. This ensures that if i grant user A an account on my laptop, what ever he runs will be in his userland. It will not affect me nor try to change the binary files in the common executable paths. If Google is thinking this way, then they may just be 'a little' right on their claim. Solaris have been working on something that i think can achieve this (stand to be corrected), Containers and Zones<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers> The BSd family have had their version for a while called Jails<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_jail>. Get it from the horses mouth <http://wiki.freebsd.org/Jails>. There is a list of OS support for such system<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system-level_virtualization>and what they can do. Some use external applications, for example, Linux, AIX others have it embedded into the OS, for example, Solaris. FreeBSD -- Mike Of course, you might discount this possibility, but remember that one in a million chances happen 99% of the time. ------------------------------------------------------------
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