One Laptop per Child security

[Ivan Krstić]

Hi Paul,

Paul J. Morris wrote:
> If a worm can propagate to every OLPC laptop it must
> have network access in some form, this means it could use the entire set
> of OLPC laptops to perform a distributed denial of service attack on a
> target.

Sort of. The worm would still be subject to connection rate and
bandwidth throttling, so the laptops are not _that_ useful as a DDoS
launchpad. But it's all a big hypothetical scenario, because finding
invariants to infect across all OLPC systems is likely to prove
extremely difficult; only applications that the user sometimes runs
generally listen on a port and act as a server. There aren't going to be
unprotected, constantly-running servers to exploit.

-- 
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | GPG: 0x147C722D

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