Re: Love that Cheese Worm! Linux

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Wed May 23 2001 - 02:39:47 MDT


Harvey Newstrom wrote:
 
> Even if you think this worm fixes bad holes, wait until somebody decides
> that Microsoft Visual Basic is just too dangerous, and tries to "fix" it on
> everybody else's computer. I fear the coming wave of copycats who will try
> to be "helpful" without asking.

The more worms out there, the better. Also, people continuing banging on the
fre *nix kernels, waves of waves of code reviews and machines out there being
exposed to diverse attacks will eventually produce pretty secure, resilient
systems. The NSA Linux kernel is rather interesting from this point of view.
It might or might not contain some very difficult to detect easter eggs, but
the architecture itself is nicely different from the unconscious assumption
the other guys play nice.

Closed source systems with their security by obscurity approach do not
profit from this process.



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