One Laptop per Child security

[Steven M. Bellovin]

On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:03:27 -0800
Ivan Krsti? <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:

> 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.
> 
What about unprotected, frequently-running web browsers?


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

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