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RE: Challenge: Find potential use cases for non-trivial confinement


From: Christopher Nelson
Subject: RE: Challenge: Find potential use cases for non-trivial confinement
Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 10:05:23 -0600

> This isn't just the OS.  This is the TCB.  That is only the 
> central part, which is extremely sensitive.  If something 
> goes wrong there, the whole system is compromised.  This is 
> not something that should be risked for a triviality such as 
> convenience, IMO.
> 
> Any other part of the OS (and that's almost everything) can 
> indeed be upgraded without a reboot.
 
Lol. Okay.
So the TCB *isn't* the OS.  What's in the TCB?  Let's see... The kernel,
of course.  Probably the network stack (those are always perfect)...
Umm... Interface drivers for the keyboard and the mouse and my
newfangled widget....  Also... Let's see.. Oh yeah ALL the drivers for
untrustable hardware buses, which includes my network card, my video
card, my sound card... And of course, those are all gonna be perfect.

My point is that the TCB includes stuff that needs updating, and may
need updating on a regular basis as bugs are discovered.  Requiring a
production server to have manual intervention for each update is just
not feasible for large datacenters.  Maybe you feel that this is not an
area that is of interest to the Hurd.

-={C}=- 




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