Re: Green Hills CEO: Linux threat to free world!

From: CodeSprite (pmaloy_at_codesprite.com)
Date: 04/10/04 

Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 18:12:38 -0400

"Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" <larwe@larwe.com> wrote in message
news:608b6569.0404091334.5addfe27@posting.google.com...
> > to happen, but what are the real safeguards against backdoors in Linux?
When
> > I've tried using it, I've had to install libraries from all over the
place
> > just to get all the applications I want working (and the new libraries
stop
> > other apps working, but let's not go there) - and I certainly haven't
seen
>
> So, if I may compress your statements into a particularly worm-ridden
> nutshell: You installed random software from diverse and untrusted
> sources not familiar to you, in order to solve compatibility problems
> you didn't fully understand, and you expected the result to be a
> coherent, secure, monolithic block with totally predictable behavior?
>

Well, I don't recall ever installing an application onto Windows, finding it
required an updated DLL, and when that DLL is installed finding that other
applications installed earlier in the day mysteriously stop working, which
is a parallel to my experience with linux - all applications and libraries
installed from Mandrake's rpm repository. But as I said - that's a side
issue and almost certainly entirely due to my own lack of understanding.

More germaine to the thread though is the whole issue of what you put into
your system - isn't it part of the Linux raison d'etre that you can take
software components from multiple sources and expect them all to run as a
coherent robust whole?

If you install a component from a trusted source, but that component uses
libraries that have been written by an anonymous donor half a world away,
how many people would find all of the original source code, read through it
line by line to convince themselves there are no hidden traps, then rebuild
the library to be SURE what's in the library is what is in the source code
they've reviewed?

I suggest that Linux security is an illusion. For projects where I need many
different functional modules within an operating system I'd prefer to use a
proprietary OS like QNX (someone will now tell me of a security hole in QNX
*laughing*). I will use an open source operating system if it is small
enough for the complete source code to be reviewed and corrected where
necessary (ie uC/OS - warts 'n all, having the source code allowed an idle
task race condition to be found and corrected).

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