Re: Antivirus? (and firewalls)

[cogNiTioN <cognition@bigfoot.com>]

On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Marc Rubin, Jay's Island Software Development & Consulting wrote:

> Donovan pointed out that bad behavior is much less likely in open source
> programs. True, but that would give me more comfort if I had time to
> carefully study (and understand) all the source code ;->  

With OSS, it isn't easy to hide stuff. One good way to get round this
would be for someone like, say, Redhat to check the source and then pgp
sign the files.

Besides, the person hiding the stuff in the software has no guarentee that
the user won't check the source.
 
> So I'm still interested in the sandbox idea. One aspect would be to allow a
> suspect program to write only to its own documented config and data files,
> and warn about / disallow writing to (or removing) other files.

Couldn't this be done with 'suid'? i.e. set up a 'user' that the
questionable programs run as, and then chown it's documented files to it,
and have it only access them?
  
cog
--                   ,------------------------------,
,====================| S H U N  A N T I O N L I N E |===================,
|  David M. Webster  '------------------------------'  (aka cogNiTioN)  | 
|=======================================================================|
| cognition@bigfoot.com |=============| cognite.net will be online RSN. |
'====== I use Linux everyday to up my productivity - so up yours! ======'