[79132] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: One Laptop per Child security
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steven M. Bellovin)
Thu Feb 8 21:24:31 2007
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2007 20:10:34 -0500
From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <smb@cs.columbia.edu>
To: Ivan =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Krsti=3F?= <krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>
Cc: "Paul J. Morris" <mole@morris.net>,
Metzdowd Crypto <cryptography@metzdowd.com>
In-Reply-To: <45CB901F.1080204@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu>
On Thu, 08 Feb 2007 13:03:27 -0800
Ivan Krsti? <krstic@solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Hi Paul,
>=20
> Paul J. Morris wrote:
> > If a worm can propagate to every OLPC laptop it must
> > have network access in some form, this means it could use the
> > entire set of OLPC laptops to perform a distributed denial of
> > service attack on a target.
>=20
> Sort of. The worm would still be subject to connection rate and
> bandwidth throttling, so the laptops are not _that_ useful as a DDoS
> launchpad. But it's all a big hypothetical scenario, because finding
> invariants to infect across all OLPC systems is likely to prove
> extremely difficult; only applications that the user sometimes runs
> generally listen on a port and act as a server. There aren't going to
> be unprotected, constantly-running servers to exploit.
>=20
What about unprotected, frequently-running web browsers?
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
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