How do you secure 100 Million Laptops?
From eWeek:
If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history.
Wary of the security risks associated with a computing monoculture—millions of machines with hardware and software of identical design—OLPC foundation officials are seeking help from the world’s best hackers to review the full specifications of the $100 laptop’s security model.
It’s a good question, and worth some thought. You probably can’t go down the typical anti-virus route depending on constantly updated signatures of common viruses. Yet, you need an updating scheme for when flaws are detected. You need strong controls everywhere from the BIOS to the disk, but you don’t want to hamstring users.
Perhaps a call to the Xbox 360 team at Microsoft would be in order. That’s been out for about a year, and despite the attempts of tons of hackers, people still can’t run unauthorized stuff on there—yet.
One thought on “How do you secure 100 Million Laptops?”
There are a lot of aspects of securing these systems that need serious consideration, not just your typical “don’t let it become a zombie spam network”. These machines are (as far as I know) supposed to go to children, not adults. While you don’t want to restrict children from exploring and creating (since that’s what they do best), you don’t really want to unleash the whole beast of securing a computer and taking care of your identity on someone that doesn’t know how to take care of themselves in the real world.
I drive a convertible. Two months ago, someone slashed the top open to unlock the door to steal my sunglasses and CD case. After I got it back from the shop with a new top, I stopped locking my doors, and just took all my stuff with me when I wasn’t in the car. Likewise, some of the mindpower working on this issue should be focused on thinking about how much we want to let the machines know about their owners, and what kind of data we want them to be able to store.
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