I would instead say that countries that don't secure their infrastructure are doomed, which will be almost all of them. Maybe all of the ones that currently exist.
Systems that show that reasonable security is possible includes NaCl, seL4, and CHERI, the last two of which are based on the work of Mark Miller and his colleagues like Jonathan Shapiro. Possibly O'Dowd has written similarly robust systems, without being able to show them publicly; possibly not. But plainly it is possible to do so.
The evidence suggests that O'Dowd has not written similarly robust systems, because several serious vulnerabilities have been found in the INTEGRITY RTOS sold by Green Hills Software, a company he founded, of which he was CEO, and of which he is still president. These vulnerabilities are of precisely the type that secure development practices would trivially prevent: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2260...
O'Dowd did correctly identify the impossibility of making Linux secure in his controversial 02004 series of white papers, "Linux Security Controversy", now memory-holed from Green Hills's website but still present on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20040610165447/https://www.ghs.c...:
> Since Linux, UNIX, and Windows were not originally designed for security, they are unlikely designed for security, they are unlikely to ever exceed Common Criteria EAL4. They all have millions of lines of insecure code that can't be fixed.
> Our INTEGRITY real-time operating system was designed from day one to meet the highest levels of software security. The only way to come close to the level of security that INTEGRITY has already attained is to start over from scratch. But if such an effort were to result in a secure operating system, it would not be Linux, it would be something else.
However, he also touts the benefits of security through obscurity:
> Secrecy is an Important Component of Security
Consequently the above-mentioned vulnerabilities in INTEGRITY seem to have been found by analyzing the binary without access to the source code; presumably the number of such vulnerabilities that are undetected is enormously larger.
Reading O'Dowd's 02004 white paper demonstrates the reason: the security of INTEGRITY is said to rely on formal code review and verification tests, not ruthlessly simple design and formal proofs (though he does say that the FAA safety certifications done of INTEGRITY were done by formal-methods mathematicians and that one of its virtues is that it is small, "a few thousand lines of privileged-mode code", similar in size to the seL4 kernel).
A potential difficulty is that there's an important difference between "making a system not vulnerable to any attackers" and "making a system vulnerable only to its author", but as long as its author is not attacking it, the difference is not observable in the system's behavior. (O'Dowd himself makes this point in part II of his white papers: "A clever subversion will never cause the operating system to work incorrectly except when it is being exploited by its inventor. Even then, only the inventor usually sees the incorrect operation.") You have to look at the proofs or other evidence used to demonstrate the system's security. For the public to do this requires that they be publicly available. And, as Miller correctly points out, it's possible for the author to still possess information about flaws that the proofs fail to address.
Still, I think it's possible for someone who isn't the a...
I love how in situations of economic strain everybody comes out with their takes on it. He is wrong on most of his takes here especially the tesla part we have enough historically data to know how to revigorat a strained or collapsed economy the real question is how long the political parties need to adept them. There is nothing magic about it it's just how long are profits for corps and the 1% more in favor than the rest of the country.
Why does FSD seem to be the be-all-end-all of Tesla in many conversations? I ordered a Tesla and opted to not purchase FSD. I'll re-evaluate as time marches on (may even pay the $200 or whatever for a month when I have a long road trip), but even if FSD was never a thing, it's still a very fun and capable EV as-is.
4 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 15.1 ms ] threadSystems that show that reasonable security is possible includes NaCl, seL4, and CHERI, the last two of which are based on the work of Mark Miller and his colleagues like Jonathan Shapiro. Possibly O'Dowd has written similarly robust systems, without being able to show them publicly; possibly not. But plainly it is possible to do so.
The evidence suggests that O'Dowd has not written similarly robust systems, because several serious vulnerabilities have been found in the INTEGRITY RTOS sold by Green Hills Software, a company he founded, of which he was CEO, and of which he is still president. These vulnerabilities are of precisely the type that secure development practices would trivially prevent: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-2260...
O'Dowd did correctly identify the impossibility of making Linux secure in his controversial 02004 series of white papers, "Linux Security Controversy", now memory-holed from Green Hills's website but still present on the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20040610165447/https://www.ghs.c...:
> Since Linux, UNIX, and Windows were not originally designed for security, they are unlikely designed for security, they are unlikely to ever exceed Common Criteria EAL4. They all have millions of lines of insecure code that can't be fixed.
> Our INTEGRITY real-time operating system was designed from day one to meet the highest levels of software security. The only way to come close to the level of security that INTEGRITY has already attained is to start over from scratch. But if such an effort were to result in a secure operating system, it would not be Linux, it would be something else.
However, he also touts the benefits of security through obscurity:
> Secrecy is an Important Component of Security
Consequently the above-mentioned vulnerabilities in INTEGRITY seem to have been found by analyzing the binary without access to the source code; presumably the number of such vulnerabilities that are undetected is enormously larger.
Reading O'Dowd's 02004 white paper demonstrates the reason: the security of INTEGRITY is said to rely on formal code review and verification tests, not ruthlessly simple design and formal proofs (though he does say that the FAA safety certifications done of INTEGRITY were done by formal-methods mathematicians and that one of its virtues is that it is small, "a few thousand lines of privileged-mode code", similar in size to the seL4 kernel).
A potential difficulty is that there's an important difference between "making a system not vulnerable to any attackers" and "making a system vulnerable only to its author", but as long as its author is not attacking it, the difference is not observable in the system's behavior. (O'Dowd himself makes this point in part II of his white papers: "A clever subversion will never cause the operating system to work incorrectly except when it is being exploited by its inventor. Even then, only the inventor usually sees the incorrect operation.") You have to look at the proofs or other evidence used to demonstrate the system's security. For the public to do this requires that they be publicly available. And, as Miller correctly points out, it's possible for the author to still possess information about flaws that the proofs fail to address.
Still, I think it's possible for someone who isn't the a...