Re: Antivirus? (and firewalls)

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, Marc Rubin, Jay's Island Software Development & Consulting wrote:

> Agreed, but all too many programs -must- be run as root, or at least be

Only servers ( because they often need to bind to port < 1024 ) 

> given root privileges. As distributions become more user-friendly, the boost
> in popularity is likely to attract twisted minds to create more native Linux
> viruses, worms, and trojan horses. 

It is not so easy to put virii in open source programs. Unless one
downloads software haphazardly from everywhere on the net,or an authors
website gets cracked, this is not a problem. ( What will happen in
practice is a lot of people *will* download software from alll over the
place ) 

> Along with native virus scanning software, I wonder if it would be practical
> to create a software "sandbox" in which to test potentially malicious
> programs? They would be allowed to run as root, but certain system calls
> would be intercepted. 

I'd suspect that people clueful enough to use a sandbox will also be
selective about the sources from which they acquire their sofware. 

I'd also suspect that it would be quite difficult: anything that runs as
root needs to make "dangerous" system calls, and one can do a lot of
malicious things without being root.

> in one window made one program especially easy to use. Have Inde developers
> settled on a particular programming language GUI front ends? 

I have been writing in perl-Tk to date, mostly because I am familiar with
perl.

> installing just the runtime would be easier. Anyway, has anyone tried
> writing utilities for Inde in Java? The portability can really leverage a
> developer's time & energy. 

I haven't ( though I have dabbled with Java ). Perl is also portable.

I believe java programs can use the QT widget set nowadays.

-- 
Donovan