Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS 466
An anonymous reader writes "Several newspapers have reported that DRDO (the defence R&D organization of the Indian military) is planning to create an OS. The need for this arose due to the cyber security concerns facing India and that all [conventional] operating systems are made outside India. About 50 professionals in Bangalore and New Delhi are expected to start work on this operating system." At least one of the linked articles says the new OS, though home-grown, would run Windows software.
I hope they name it CURRY (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I hope they name it CURRY (Score:5, Funny)
Only if they write it in Haskell [wikipedia.org].
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The same article links to an actual programming language called Curry based on Haskell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry_programming_language [wikipedia.org]
Re:I hope they name it CURRY (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, but Haskell came first, and has broader name recognition (and so I thought it made the joke best). And Haskell apparently some real-world uses, which means it must have gotten a LOT better since I first beta-tested it, back when it was compiled into Common Lisp.
Huge fan of it, actually. I don't get to work in it but my coding style was heavily influenced by the things I learned coding in Haskell. My main fondness: by the time you got the damn thing to compile, the program would generally work. Aggravating at the time, but it made me really respect how much work the compiler could do in spotting bugs if your language is REALLY bondage-and-discipline strong typing.
The LP features of Curry won't endear it to anybody who didn't already grok Haskell, but they're certainly a neat addition, and a lot more than syntactic sugar.
Already an open source alternative to windows (Score:3, Interesting)
It's called reactOS. It's basically windows (it's NT architecture based), but free. Quite frankly, I don't know why Linux has gotten so much attention in comparison to reactOS. The thing is, it's still a under-funded garage-project. If you could get 50 Indians and a good budget to help them out, I'm pretty sure that it would be better than starting from scratch.
Here's the link if you're interested:
http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html [reactos.org]
Re:Already an open source alternative to windows (Score:5, Informative)
The trouble with Windows [compatible] OSes is not that it should be capable of running software written for Windows. It is that Windows itself has design weaknesses for various reasons not the least of which are related to its DOS based origins and support for old, misbehaving "legacy" software. To write a Windows compatible OS, you would also have to mimic a wide range of idiosyncratic behaviors in order to support Windows applications.
Now, if for some reason, all the bad-behaving software were cast aside and only good Windows software were used, the notion might stand a chance. I remain quite skeptical it, or any Windows-compatible OS, would become completely viable.
Looking at it another way, the SaMBa project is constantly playing catch-up against the moving target that is Windows networking. And that is just one aspect of the Windows OS family. Imagine this on an entire OS? It would be hard pressed to actually work.
They'd be better off making a BSD modified OS and pulling in WINE.
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So, the new Indian OS can make itself 10 times more secure than Windows with the simple expedient of not allowing users to install random shit off the internet.
Your post actually demonstrates that there IS something fundamentally wrong with Windows.
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A Unix based OS with the facilities in place to assimilate Microsoft's shoddy product isn't safe. That's rather the whole point. Microsoft didn't leave their poor design and engineering choices behind with DOS. The legacy of DOS is laziness and incompetence. The fact that it is not quite as obvious any more doesn't mean that Microsoft still isn't doing incredibly stupid things and doing them haphazardly.
Blaming the user simply doesn't cut it. Microsoft makes crap that's inherently dangerous to operate due t
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Linux has a "keep user from doing dumb shit" button. It's called non-root access. And it works.
It's not security by obscurity, it is real security.
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ReactOS does pull in wine - last I read. But as the wine developers will tell you, Windows basically sucks. There are so many hacks and kludges which have been developed in Windows over the years, the wine guys are forced to constantly re-implement them. Far too many applications actually demand improper behavior from the OS APIs to function properly. Even worse, this behavior can depend on which MS OS variant its running under.
Re:Already an open source alternative to windows (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't want open source, they want their own proprietary OS. Code that they control, and isn't available for scrutiny by those that would attack them.
And I expect the comment about running Windows software in one of the articles was a mistake on the part of the journalist or the politician. Possibly a language based misunderstanding. I expect they mean windowing software. A desktop gui rather than a cli.
It just doesn't make sense to make it Windows compatible. It's a monumentally hard thing to do, as demonstrated by the timescales of WINE. And the result would be a system with many of the same vulnerabilities as Windows, and thus it would break the primary objective.
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They can have it. They could use BSD as a base.
Or they could just start with Linux and the GNU tools and make their own variant. The code is all theirs. The GPL only requires source code be provided when the software is transferred. Merely providing the software for use doesn't entitle each person sitting behind the keyboard to a copy of the source. If it's all under control of the DRDO at all times, they are not required to provide the source code to anyone.
Also, the GPL is only effective due to strong cop
Re:Already an open source alternative to windows (Score:5, Insightful)
At least one of the linked articles says the new OS, though home-grown, would run Windows software.
Brilliant. If you're into security, there's one rule of thumb you can always count on. Don't develop your own. Invariably you'll overlook something obscure and subtle and will create a weakness big enough to fly a 747 through. Stick with time-proven methods that have been under the microscope for years and have withstood the test of time and had all the bugs, shortfalls, and subtle problems worked out of them. Basically, you're not smarter than all the people that have contributed to making the currently available selections as secure as they presently are.
If they're going to create an entirely new os themselves, in-house, for the sake of security, they're about to re-learn the above lesson.
And sorry, but runs Windows? The whole security problem there to begin with is its never-ending craving to run old software that just wasn't bothered to be written securely. Look at the giant headache that was the breaking of windows software when XP came out. Then when Vista came out. Then when 7 came out. This is going to be a whole new level worse. They may say it can run Windows software, but either it won't run MOST of it, or they're just going to be defeating one of the primary purposes of writing their own secure OS to jimmy it to run any sizeable portion. If they're insisting on making their own OS, they may as well expect to have to write their own software too. In for a penny, in for a pound.
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Actually, a Haskell Indian Nations University, named after a guy named (Dudley) Haskell, a white guy tangentially involved in its creation. But the irony is still appreciated.
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Oh For Chrissakes (Score:2)
Oh for Chrissakes, another nation rebranding an existing OS and calling it their own. It's fucking pathetic. What do they think, that the hackers will be fooled and won't think it's just Windows?
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I wonder why they don't just make a fork of OpenBSD?
Mod parent up. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, if you think your people are good enough to write a SECURE operating system from the ground up, then shouldn't they be good enough to take existing code and determine whether that is secure enough for them?
Even Linux for that matter. The NSA has already done some of the work with SE Linux.
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Security needs to be designed in from the ground up. Take a look at Windows, Linux, and MacOS. New exploits are constantly being discovered in those systems because security was not a key part of the development process when they were written.
Windows, Linux, and MacOS were all written in
Re:Mod parent up. (Score:4, Informative)
Well OpenBSD it practically is. Some articles claim it is written ground up for security, but in reality they audited the entire BSD codebase many years ago, rewriting large parts [openbsd.org] and all new code is ground-up secure. In practice it is extremely secure, many of the bugs that occur in other BSDs or linux turn out to have been fixed months or years before in openBSD
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Whilst it's written with C, you might as well be trying to repair a roof with swiss cheese.
Whatever language you write an operating system in will have to have the same "dangerous" facilities as C, pointer access, type casting, etc. Remember without an OS you cannot have safe managed code - you need to be able to implement things like page table mappings, page protection, interrupt processing, etc. Basically you are not going to get around the fact that writing operating systems is hard
Arguably in this environment C is safer than C++ because of its simplicity. Now that said, a lot of the utiliti
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If you want a secure system you make sure every action and every module of code is authenticated before it runs
Absolutely not. In a secure system, none of the modules trusts that the others are bug free.
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Until the early to mid '90s, the term 'UNIX Security' was considered a joke. In comparison to systems like OS/370, VMS, and so on that were designed for security, UNIX was a toy. It didn't even have access control lists for files, and trust was entirely binary - if your web server needed to be able to bind to port 80, it also got the ability to modify every single file on the system, write directly to devices, and so on. Linux adopted the UNIX lack-of-security model from the start, although has recently
Re:Mod parent up. (Score:5, Informative)
Windows NT first several beta's booted using the OS2LDR.EXE file from prerelease versions of OS/2 2.0. The first thing you saw on the console was "OS2LDR.EXE
Windows NT was not designed for security -- The first version was hacked together using bits of OS/2 2.0 code, ports of existing Windows code, etc. For the record, I worked at Micrografx when they (a) had source code and early binaries of Windows NT, and (b) was part of the team that worked on OS/2.
With regard to your spurious example implying ACLs make something secure, again, you've been shoveling out the stables. ACLs do not make something secure (they may contribute to a security solution) and the lack of ACLs does not make something insecure. Security is not about how you achieve something, security is about what is achieved. Fundamentally, the only truly secure computer is one that not connected to a network, kept behind several locked doors, with guards that are so well paid or loyal such that they cannot be bribed. This goes on and on, no software added after security is certified, no external access other than keyboard, no externally accessible disk drives/cdrom/usb, etc. Everything else is a careful balancing act of risk, vulnerabilities, and mitigation.
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And when I was young, we had to walk to school, uphills both ways. We had to wrap barbed wire around our bare feet for traction on the dry ice that formed due to the cold.
In other words: I did claim that *NIX has always been perfect. I am simply saying they got their shit together a lot better, faster and more thoroughly than the Windows world.
Not true. The security model of UNIX is DAC based, reflecting a past when systems were secure by isolation. Almost no one was connected back then. The systems of the day did not reflect any of the realities Windows systems face nowadays. Not that it absolves the security blunders committed in some of the design of Windows. But the security architecture of NT (based in great part on VMS which was a lot more secure from the ground up than UNIX) is superior than what you find in a typical out-of-the-box Unix s
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Next Tuesday, MS will break the record for patches in one day. Before the recent bzip2 DoS hole, I don't even know _what_ I patched last.
Your obscurity argument would hold more water if most *NIX would not dominate the server hosting as much as it does. And those machines tend to be unfiltered while Windows machines tend to be behind NAT/a firewall.
And finally, even _if_ the obscurity argument was valid (I happen to think it's not, feel free to disagree), there is no way to make *NIX less obscure just to pr
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Next Tuesday, MS will break the record for patches in one day. Before the recent bzip2 DoS hole, I don't even know _what_ I patched last.
Your obscurity argument would hold more water if most *NIX would not dominate the server hosting as much as it does. And those machines tend to be unfiltered while Windows machines tend to be behind NAT/a firewall.
And finally, even _if_ the obscurity argument was valid (I happen to think it's not, feel free to disagree), there is no way to make *NIX less obscure just to prove your point.
Every single production UNIX/Linux box I've encountered has sit behind a NAT/firewall. Machines that are not unfiltered (be it *NIX or Windows) typically sit within an intranet already enclosed by NATs/firewalls.
So, for all intents and purposes, as of right now, *NIX is more secure.
"Being secure" is a broad subject. For many purposes *NIX systems are more secure (from the point of view of users requiring discretionary access control). But I'll ask you, how do you implement MAC on a *NIX system (one that does not have to be retrofitted like SELinux or Linux+AppArmor)?
Explain
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And the people who came after them probably said the same...
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If their intention is to "run Windows software", as the summary states, then I think they'd get farther along by forking ReactOS.
Sure, its basis isn't "written at home", but unless it's merely a matter of national pride, you still have essentially the same advantage with OSS. Namely, that you can look at everything and verify what it does before using it in a security-critical environment.
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Re:Oh For Chrissakes (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it amusing that some people think that a nation's defense research organisation, which helps build ICBMs, supersonic aircraft, tactical software and so on, needs advice from someone who reading slashdot on how to write an operating system.
Well, in the US -- I don't know about the Indian military -- the same defense establishment that operates those ICBMs etc. also mostly runs Windows. Which is a pretty clear indication that they do need help, and the Slashdot crowd would probably be a good place to get it.
This is at least partly personal experience talking. When I was a medic in the USAF, one of my secondary duties was "computer systems security NCO" for the ER where I worked. Which mainly meant light sysadmin duties, trying to keep machines patched and virus-free with absolutely zero support from the actual hospital IT staff, and debunking "I LOVE YOU virus" warnings and similar bouts of hysteria that Col. So-and-so forwarded to everyone's e-mail ("it must be true, the Colonel said it!") Actual security was a joke.
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Joking aside, flyboy. 2Axxx scum here, and we ran console apps cobbled together over win2K and NT4 on our classified shit. Kinda scary, eh? At least we had the mighty STU-3. [wikipedia.org]
signed, -- Terrudiger Abercrombie
Confusion (Score:5, Funny)
WINE doesn't stand for "Wine is not a complete, Windows-compatible operating system sans the security vulnerabilities".
Re:Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent insightful.
If you are going to run windows software you can bet they will start with with a Virtual Machine approach or Wine, and neither one buys them much security without diligence.
he idea that a government funded military lab would develop from the ground up and achieve something that would run windows but wasn't as vulnerable seems highly unlikely.
Budgets lapse. People Come and Go. It would be a mess.
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Most attacks can be avoided by having a secure firewall. The cyberattacks were all successful because the machines were connected to the internet "naked" - no firewall device.
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Although....
Wine with apparmor may be safer than Windows 2000....
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WINE doesn't stand for "Wine is not a complete, Windows-compatible operating system sans the security vulnerabilities".
No, but WINACWCOSSTSV sure does.
Cost (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait for the poor bastards to try outsourcing development to India.
Not the best track record (Score:5, Interesting)
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Mmmm, I wouldnt call it internal politics. Its rather to encourage local development of military hardware. In this case, it was the first attempt at an indigenous (completely indian made) tank. Due to improper planning, the project was delayed by years and they even ended up purchasing some of the components from other countries (Israel mainly). Though not a success, I would consider it a good start, and would expect future indian made tanks to be build cheaper and better
There are many other such DRDO proje
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Arjun MBT is one of the finest tanks in our part of the world. The problem with its development is not because of just DRDO. It has to do with the govt policy, the army constantly changing its requirements and finally the penetration of Russian arms agents in the Ministry of Defense. All these factors have delayed the induction of a tank that kicked Russian T-90s in every environment that the Indian Army fights in. The comparative field trials of the Indian Army a few months ago showed Arjun MBT has consistently performed better than T-90. So, DRDO came out with a better tank that Russians who have decades of tank-building experience.
The real question is:"Who ran these tests?" In my experience, I have never seen a military or defence contractor (from any nation) run test that did end up with "Hooray for our side. We won."
In general, someone who says "Wait a minute. Things aren't as good as they seem" generally gets marginalized and run out of town. See Boyd, John.
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In my experience, I have never seen a military or defence contractor (from any nation) run test that did end up with "Hooray for our side. We won."
See https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Arjun_MBT#Trials_and_exercise [wikimedia.org] The army openly released test results that claimed that DRDO's Arjun did not meet their requirements. Its only in 2010, that the Indian Army results showed that Arjun performed better than Russian tanks.
The Wheel (Score:5, Funny)
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If it weren't for repeated reinvention of the wheel, they would still be hexagonal rocks. Reinvention is what drives technology forward. Invention is a rare treat.
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The word for what you are describing is "refinement", not "reinvention".
Re:The Wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
HAH! 'Tired' -- good pun!
offtopic but hilarious (Score:4, Interesting)
A buddy of mine just revealed some news to me. He's been reliable about this shit in the past and he's in a position to know, so I trust it but YMMV.
Backstory: Microsoft eats their own cooking ("dogfood") except in cases of epic failure. Like Hotmail running on NT. Or Visual Safe Source for Windows's RCS. They use a heavily modified version of perforce and a hierarchy of repositories. Yeah, it's a mess and there are a number of technical as well as human/social problems.
Well, multiple groups within Microsoft have had enough and switched to git for day-to-day work (using a gateway to push their changes to an upstream p4 repo). They're trying hard to drop 4 entirely and go with git. From what I know of their development practices, they really need something like git (Linus, himself, agrees). But who's going to tell Balmer that they're switching to software written by arch-enemy Linus Torvaldes? You might think they'd prefer that (we're using your free software, faggots!), but chances are VSS 2011 will contain some sort of half-assed distributed RCS support.
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Well, multiple groups within Microsoft have had enough and switched to git for day-to-day work (using a gateway to push their changes to an upstream p4 repo).
Are you trying to give the network auditors more work? ;)
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Re:offtopic but hilarious (Score:4, Informative)
Hotmail does run on Windows. When it was purchased it did not, and it took them some time convert it. The "stories" about conversion failures were rediculous, the timelines did not give enough time for a real conversion of such systems, and people probably mistook various prototype testing as real attempts.
Sourcesafe was also never meant for anything other than workgroup projects, not large scale. As such, nobody would be expected to run something the size of the windows code base on vss. Nowadays, Microsoft has an enterprise class version control in Team Foundation Server, but I imagine they have a lot of legacy to convert to move that to TFS any time soon.
They also ran a large part of their internal processes for years on an AS/400, including accounting and other aspects. Microsoft didn't have applications to do what they needed on Windows, and didn't really want to invest in building them. However, now that they bought Great Plains.. that's a different story.
Due to legacy concerns, they aren't likely to convert from p4 for a very long time, although the beauty of git is that in workgroups you can use git and push changes upstream. If anything, they're most likely to convert to TFS, for long term overall project.. Already most of the tools development, web development, etc.. is done on TFS.
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Dunno about other areas, but the Codeplex division uses hg (which is no secret AFAIK)
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From what I know of their development practices, they really need something like git (Linus, himself, agrees). But who's going to tell Balmer that they're switching to software written by arch-enemy Linus Torvaldes? You might think they'd prefer that (we're using your free software, faggots!), but chances are VSS 2011 will contain some sort of half-assed distributed RCS support.
From http://lwn.net/Articles/403903/ [lwn.net] :
Microsoft's CodePlex.com has announced the donation of $25,000 to support the development of the Mercurial source code management system.
Looks like they've found what they're looking for.
I think Novell may have something to say... (Score:4, Funny)
They already own DRDOS.
Why against this? (Score:2)
Re:Why against this? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would have great interest in an OS that can run windows binaries without all the windows-shit.
Then maybe you can join the ReactOS [reactos.org] team. If you're really interested, you might be allowed to become the project leader.
Why not do *BSD or Linux code review and use it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, why not take a *BSD or Linux OS release and do a full source code review on it? It will take a lot less effort than creating anything from scratch, plus they can submit bug reports and code fixes back to the corresponding opensource projects. (Everybody wins!!!) Any mature OS would not be plagued by bugs that commonly occur in large new code bases. After reviewing and approving the OS, they can simply track changes of future releases in order to maintain trust.
Re:Why not do *BSD or Linux code review and use it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly, and sharing vital technology with the enemy is mostly just a good way to ensure that everybody loses. Parity and equilibrium aren't good once the war starts getting hot, because then you end up with WWI.
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But bearing in mind that a number of the participating countries introduced conscription, being a civilian at the start didn't guarantee that you wouldn't be forced to be a soldier and end up dying of chlorine poisoning.
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The idea that an OS is equivalent to a weapons system is absurd, and thinking of it that way (which means it should be kept secret from potential enemies) is pretty much a guarantee of failure. "Everybody wins" is very definitely an option in the network security realm.
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No, an OS isn't a weapons system. But it is a defense system. They are not the same thing.
Re:Why not do *BSD or Linux code review and use it (Score:4, Informative)
Seems to me that plenty of countries (including the US) manufacture weapons for use and for distribution to other countries. Thing is, you're not at war most of the time, and you're almost never at war with everyone.
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With some 100% home grown OS, then we can be pretty sure that some large military contractor wins, at 250% of the quoted cost. Whether that results in something that's usable in war is an open question.
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Like hiding valuables out of sight when locking your car.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that intended to not let the potential burglar know that there's any reason to break into the car? I think the analogy you need is something like developing an alternative to keys, rather than just improving the current designs as much as you can...
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Are you joking? Leaving valuables out of sight definitely is a good precaution. It wouldn't work if thieves were allowed to methodically search through each car (akin to a port scan) but they aren't.
If the 90s are to be a guide. (Score:2, Troll)
6 months after the OS is declared done, all of the developers will have anchor babies in the US and their replacements will determine that the code base is a mass of unintelligible crap.
LK
ReactOS anyone ? (Score:2)
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Or maybe they had to promise "window" apps to their leaders and will deliver apps which do indeed have "windows", just not the microsoft kind. I doubt anybody will notice the difference.
Trusting Trust (Score:3, Insightful)
Less Secure (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that an OS developed by an org that's never made an OS before, by 50 people, that isn't examined by many people around the world in many different contexts and from many different approaches, is going to be less tested and less secure than other OS'es. Not to mention the lack of applications, and the burden of creating all the applications from scratch, and a developer community for them, and again the smallness and isolation of that community and its apps leaving security to a very few very busy people.
If I were responsible for protecting India's IT infrastructure, I might start an Indian state project to create an OS. But I'd just start with Android or Linux, and assign the people I have to investigating its open code for security holes and starting applications needed by essential Indian users. A lot less work, a lot more global partners to use (and many to omit from trust without losing everyone). Leveraging the English speaking skills of educated Indians to partner with people around the world to secure India.
Reading the press, it seems they're really talking about a component in their new line of spy and military satellites. They mention they've got orders from other countries. So probably this venture is not at all calculated on security rissk, but rather on a perceived market opportunity. In which case it is even more likely to totally fail, but not after wasting a lot of time and money better spent on actual Indian security risks.
Probably some general's nephew thinks he can sell some Linux clone to the government, and so the rest of the state and media apparatus starts talking it up.
unofficial name (Score:2)
The ARE expecting security through obscurity (Score:4, Interesting)
'Though it will be a real-time system with Windows software, source code and architecture will be proprietary, giving us the exclusivity of owning a system unknown to foreign elements and protect our security system,' Saraswat said after unveiling a training facility at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR), a defence lab in this tech hub.
Classic first timer mistake.
No mention of capability based security either.
At best they end up with a bad clone of Windows or Linux.
What about the CPU (and other) microcode? (Score:2)
I'm in awe. (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, they're not going to develop any such thing. Ever. This is one of the most brilliant job security moves I've ever seen in the computer industry. Kudos!
Microkernel to the rescue! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:SHIVA (Score:5, Funny)
"I am become /dev/null, the destroyer of data."
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I can imagine that if their os runs windows programs it would be in some sort of sandboxed environment. I didn't rtfa, but I wouldn't suppose that it is capable of running any windows program. There would probably be restrictions on what input/output ports can be accessed. Same for disk / memory access and network connectivity. Maybe it just has a virtual windows machine on it, in which case, the "bad windows" can be wiped. Heck.. the "good windows" could be wiped daily.
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WindowsNT/WindowsXP has vastly better security than Windws95/WindowsME, even though they all run windows applications. The big difference is that Windows95/WindowsME lacked a memory model that sandboxed each application's memory. That meant one rogue application on Windows95/ME could start modifying kernel memory, or other applications' memory. Instead, under WindowsNT/WindowsXP, an application exits with a general protection fault.
There are stricter security models that go beyond merely sandboxing me
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Exactly.
If you run windows apps, you have to replicate or emulate, and that would be wine.
They could run VMs that get fresh loaded images each reboot, but that's still windows, and still vulnerable while its running.
Re:Who can be trusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't use Binary Blobs, I agree, absolutely, if you care at all about your Sovereignty. Get the source tree for an already very well secured OS like, say, OpenBSD, or perhaps Linux (though OBSD is, I believe, generally developed with practices that encourage better security - less focus on feature, more on audits and exploit finding/fixing). Have your 'trusted' developers from your nation go over every line of code, to make sure no trojans/backdoors/intentional exploits were added, then build it all yourself.
Of course, there is still always the possibility you have a hacked C compiler. Man, I can't remember the name of it now, but sometime in, I think it was the 80's, someone made a pretty famous presentation/paper about putting a self-perpetuating trojan into a compiler. You could give the compiler source code, and the binary of the compiler to the 'mark', but you could completely remove the exploit from the source code, as long as the exploit was coded to compile itself into subsequent builds of the compiler; that is, the binary was infected, but the source was not, but it didn't matter since the infected binary could build a copy of itself into the next build of the compiler. The exploit could then additionally do something like whenever it built other binaries or libraries, add some exploit code to them as well.
I suppose you need your own people to do a dis-assembly of the compiler to verify that. Or, build your own assembler in machine language, then build your own compiler with your assembler. Once you've done that, if you have a trusted compiler, and verified source code, you don't really lose security by using Open Source. If anything, it'll *probably* be more secure, if it's popular enough to have a lot of devs analyzing it and fixing problems.
Re:Who can be trusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there is still always the possibility you have a hacked C compiler. Man, I can't remember the name of it now, but sometime in, I think it was the 80's, someone made a pretty famous presentation/paper about putting a self-perpetuating trojan into a compiler. You could give the compiler source code, and the binary of the compiler to the 'mark', but you could completely remove the exploit from the source code, as long as the exploit was coded to compile itself into subsequent builds of the compiler; that is, the binary was infected, but the source was not, but it didn't matter since the infected binary could build a copy of itself into the next build of the compiler. The exploit could then additionally do something like whenever it built other binaries or libraries, add some exploit code to them as well.
That would be Ken Thompson. [bell-labs.com]
Re:Who can be trusted? (Score:5, Informative)
It was Ken Thompson, the man himself, that you're referring to. The talk in question can be found here: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html [bell-labs.com]
"Trusting trust" attack can be countered using DDC (Score:5, Informative)
You're talking about the trusting trust attack, which was made famous by Ken Thompson [bell-labs.com].
Thankfully, you can counter the "trusting trust" attack using a technique called "Diverse Double-Compiling" (DDC) [dwheeler.com]. See the linked PhD dissertation for details.
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Some secury enhancements like in se linux (or trustedbsd) would (could) be nice.
However, there is a strange effect that is "too much security". Examples: Create an password policy that is too complicated an people start to write down password on a note next to(taped under) their keyboard.
Lock down a system too much and people will find workarounds not to use that system.
Have a too complicated security policy and you need too many administrators (With god mode access) that configure the security.
Having a s
Re:Who can be trusted? (Score:5, Interesting)
While this is a valid point, it really doesn't take into account the fact it takes a long time to develop a mature, reliable, secure OS. OpenBSD has been at it for more than a decade and still has issues, and some of the finest minds in security work on that, and they started with a relatively secure code base to begin with.
If you're writing your own OS from scratch, you can expect 20-30 years before it will be more secure and reliable than existing OS's (and those OS's won't be staying still so they will mature in that timeframe as well). And that's if you have experts working on it. If you're going to copy an existing OS, then what's the point?
Now, I can understand that a country wants to encourage OS development, and is willing to sponsor a defense project to build an OS, with the expectation it may take 20-30 years.. but it should really stay hidden and not publicised like this, otherwise the people start wondering "Hey, why don't we have this OS yet?" and then you end up pushing it into production long before it's ready.
The sad part is, India has a huge problem with brain drain. A large percentage of the top computer scientists relocate to EU countries, or the US. Only the truly patriotic or mediocre or worse candidates stay home, or perhaps those with some kind of community ties...
However, if India became seriouis about building a world class research program, it might encourage top talent to stay in India. I can see that as another benefit of such a program.
So i guess my point is, there are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea, but sadly.. I doubt that those reasons are the reasons they're doing it.
Re:Who can be trusted? (Score:5, Insightful)
What the fuck? A government checking the code it runs on computers with sensitive data is "national socialist"? You think the United States government doesn't do this on CIA and DOD computers? Or are you a nut against building roads?
We're talking about doing this only for government computers used for sensitive government data.
Price of software development is within reach (Score:2)
If you were to put together a custom made operating system and software suite for the handful of applications needed for government and military purposes, I'm guessing it would land in the price range around 100 to 300 million (if the US government did it). Probably more like 10 to 30 million if the Indian government did it (they have much better spending oversight). In the grand scheme of things that is relatively affordable.
If you just want an OS and one or two applications for a single platform (PC, cust
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I've met a bunch of people who tell themselves that to keep feeling superior to them
Re:Have you ever met? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes I have met some amazing Indian developers out there. There are also many H1B visa programmers who may be lacking in experience and are desperate to succeed in a foreign country which, lets be honest, considers them outsiders. They make half the pay in many situations and can be fired and sent home in the span of a week for any petty job disagreement.
True innovation requires the ability to make mistakes, learn from them, and try something new - which is contrary and alien to the H1B "cog developer" system. I doubt many Americans could be as disciplined and work under such pressures and situations.
Back home, India is building a truly amazing scientific pool of talent. Expect to see major challenges to American engineering & science - the population numbers game almost guarantees 3x the genius-level talent waiting to be discovered and educated.
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The model in place now encourages people with *no* talent for software or systems development to choose that as a career path, and it shows. That doesn't mean that there are no talented people there -- just that the outsourcing craze (and corresponding promise of significantly improved lifestyle for self and family) lures a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise even consider this career. To a lesser extent, the dot-com craze caused the same
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Re:Oh please, these people can't even do a CGI (Score:5, Interesting)
At the start you have the experts and they have people that need training but they pretend to be experts. After having contact with your experts for a while they vanish to work on higher priority projects and you are suddenly in contact with a new lot of people that really need training. In the end you are milked dry with nothing to show for it other than what is obviously some first attempts in whatever environment you have. Your project doesn't matter, the technology transfer and your cash are what the outsourcing company is aiming for. It's very similar to the long running project German rocket scientists were put on in the USSR that never got anywhere but trained a lot of staff for the real rocket program.