DARPA Open Source Security Helped FreeBSD, Junos, Mac OS X, iOS 22
An anonymous reader writes "In a February 2013 ACM Queue / Communications of the ACM article, A decade of OS access-control extensibility, Robert Watson at the University of Cambridge credits 2000s-era DARPA security research, distributed via FreeBSD, for the success of sandboxing in desktop, mobile, and embedded systems such as Mac OS X, iOS, and Juniper's Junos router OS. His blog post about the article argues that OS security extensibility is just as important as more traditional file system (VFS) and device driver extensibility features in kernels — especially in embedded environments where UNIX multi-user security makes little sense, and where tradeoffs between performance, power use, functionality, and security are very different. This seems to fly in the face of NSA's recent argument argument that one-size-fits-all SELinux-style Type Enforcement is the solution for Android security problems. He also suggests that military and academic security researchers overlooked the importance of app-store style security models, in which signed application identity is just as important as 'end users' in access control."
Re:DARPA yeilds advancements in many categories (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. The list is too long to even bother to post. But I'd wager most of what we take for granted, generally and technologically specifically, has its roots in public spending. If it wasn't publicly funded research projects that brought the technology to a state usable by private enterprise, or public money creating a market and demand for products that no one else could afford, our world would be vastly different today, and lacking in a lot. This is why I shudder at people who say that our government spending is the problem. Couldn't be further from the truth.