$100 Laptop May Be at Security Forefront (maybe thin client too?)

Out and about on the “WWW”, I crossed over this article by BRIAN BERGSTEIN AP Technology Writer at several locations. Chron.com has the complete article.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The $100 laptops planned for children around the world might turn out to be as revolutionary for their security measures as for their low-cost economics. The One Laptop Per Child project, a nonprofit begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aims to improve education by giving children hand-cranked, wireless-enabled portable computers. Governments are to buy the laptops _ beginning in 2007 with up to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina _ and hand them to kids for them to own..........

Standard computer design generally lets most any program access any file stored anywhere on the machine. That is one reason why flaws in programs can be exploited by outsiders to steal or erase private information.

By contrast, the $100 laptops will force any application to run in "a walled garden" and limit the files it can access, said Ivan Krstic, a software architect at One Laptop Per Child focused on security.

Even if the security were to fail, Krstic believes a specialized encryption technology will prevent the BIOS_ the software that runs a computer when it is initially turned on _ from being overwritten. That means the PC could not be rendered unable to boot up.

"It's essentially unbelievably difficult to do anything to the machine that would cause permanent hardware failure," Krstic said.

More images of OLPC concept devices can be viewed by clicking here.

As background, Ivan Krstic is a contributive author to “The Official Ubuntu Book”. He was also a presenter at Ubuntu Below Zero, LTSP by the Seaway on “Clustering LTSP”. Two of the topics covered were High Availability (HA) and High Performance Computing (HPC) with terminal servers.

How long before a mainstream vendor discovers that a device like OLPC may be a very good thin client as well as secure laptop?

Update 11 November 2006.

Popular Science names OLPC 2006 Grand Award winner for What's New in 2006.

Until the next post,

Steve