Friday, February 26, 2010

Cyberwar, and how you (and 4 buddies) can stop it cold.

I just posted this in a comment at Global Guerrillas: (which I highly recommend you read daily)

I think it's really sad that nobody even imagines that the systems we all depend on could be made secure.

Everything we do in the commercial world is based on a crappy security model, one barely better than none, but not sufficient to secure more than a case of beer in a college dorm room.

Everything, Linux, Windows, Mac, etc... all work based on a default permissive environment. This means you have to trust code to do exactly want you want. Which is just plain insane.

A better way is to run code without any permissions by default, and only supply it with exactly the capabilities necessary to get the job done. In the world of real security, it's called "need to know".

Credit card systems operate in the same way... if someone knows a few key details about you, they can have all your money, and more.... which is just pain nuts. It doesn't have to be that way, and it can be fixed.

I'll talk to anyone who wants to help fix this, for free, because I believe it's my duty to point out the insanity of the system we currently have rigged up.

John, it CAN be fixed... it would take a core of a few people, just people dedicated to spreading the word, and making examples that people can relate to. No big investment, no massive Manhattan style projects.

Yes, it would involve replacing our infrastructure, but we do that all the time anyway. We just need to replace the parts with something that actually works better as we go.

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