$100 laptop might bring security breakthroughs

THE ONE LAPTOP Per Child project is experimenting with a revolutionary security system that might make the devices much more secure than a PC.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the scheme to flog $100 computers to the third world is taking advantage of the start-from-scratch nature of the project to design new security protocols. Already they think that they have designed a security setup makes it unnecessary for the laptops to have anti-virus software.

Under the security protocols, applications have to run in "a walled garden" and limit the files it can access.

Ivan Krstic, a software architect at One Laptop Per Child said that even if the security fails, a specialised encryption technology will prevent the BIOS from being overwritten.

This makes it unbelievably difficult to do anything to the machine that would cause permanent hardware failure, he says. µ

L'INQ
Sydney Morning Herald