Security of new alternative operating systems
posted by irbis on Tue 18th Mar 2008 21:50
Conversations There are many interesting new alternative operating systems: Syllable, Haiku etc. They may promise speed, low system requirements and many good and promising features. However, I've been hoping that also the security of these new operating systems would be discussed more.

On the age of Internet can we even imagine a desktop operating system without also a connection to the Internet? With networking comes the need for security.

Although there may be no problem now and although developers may see many more urgent goals, the potential threats of future should be considered too. I think the history of old MS Windows versions at least up to Windows ME shows that network security cannot be easily added into the OS as an afterthought but it should be thought about and build into the OS right from the start.
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RE: Unknown
by irbis on Thu 20th Mar 2008 08:53 UTC
irbis
Member since:
2005-07-08

To some extent, yes.
But nobody can deny that there is both good and bad general operating system design, also from security and stability point of view.

So how is a secure OS developed? Look at the example of OpenBSD, for example. They take an active and aggressive, future looking approach to OS security: potential security problems are tried to deal with already before rather than only after there are any actual threats known.

Although I was referring mostly to the network security above, I was also thinking about offline security and stability issues. Things like file and user permissions and system administration rights matter a lot to overall OS security and stability. And things like that are part of the basic design of an OS.

So dealing with potential security issues is surely not just pure speculation.
One can either
1.) take security as an important design focus for a new developing OS right from the start,
2.) or think it is no big deal, and assume that people can afford to worry about such issues later if and only if necessary.
I'd rather see new operating systems take the first (1.) development route.

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