Death of antivirus software imminent

[Bill Frantz]

jason at lunkwill.org (Jason) on Wednesday, January 2, 2008 wrote:

>On the other hand, writing an OS that doesn't get infected in the first place 
>is a fundamentally winning battle: OSes are insecure because people make 
>mistakes, not because they're fundamentally insecurable.

I fully agree that a better OS would go a long way toward helping in
the battle.  We even know some techniques for building a better OS. 
Consider plash <http://sourceforge.net/projects/plash/>, and Polaris
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2004/HPL-2004-221.html>, both of
which run programs for a user with less than that user's privilege. 
This technique helps prevent viruses from infecting computers by
denying them write privileges to system files and most of the user's
files.

The model that any program a user runs can do anything that user is
permitted to do is fundamentally broken.  It is the model that all
current popular OSes support, so in that sense these OSes are
insecure.  The only mistake users make in many cases is running
software with bugs such as buffer overruns, where the virus then
uses the user's privileges to take over their system.  In these
cases, IMHO, blaming the user is inappropriate.  And in all cases,
OSes should give the user more support in making sound decisions. 
See for example: <http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/granmaRulesPola.html>

Cheers - Bill

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