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A radical solution to security?

As seasoned computer users will know, the world is filled with threats to the security of your data and the integrity of your system.

The number of worms, viruses and trojans which have infected personal, commercial, government and, most recently, industrial computers is already very long and continues to grow at an alarming rate.

Whereas just a few years ago, computer malware was "annoying" and inconvenient, our reliance on IT systems in the 21st century has risen to the point where any kind of infection has the potential to create a major disaster for companies, governments and individuals.

So what's the best way to protect against the threat of such malware?

Well the Indian government thinks they've got the solution.

At the heart of most malware infections is some kind of vulnerability in the underlying operating system software.

Be it Microsoft Windows, a widely distributed flavour of Unix/Linix or something else, chances are that crackers have found holes and exploited them.

The Indian Government however, thinks that the best answer to any threat posted to it by malware will be to design and build its very own operating system.

I'm not so sure.

Yes, most crackers focus on the easiest targets with the greatest user-base, and that inevitably means Microsoft Windows.

Since it's just as hard (or in many cases harder) to find and successfully exploit flaws in less popular OSes, there's clearly a greater "return on investment" for those doing the cracking and malware writing. This explains why we see so few bits of malware for Linux.

But would the Indian strategy of building a whole new OS from the ground-up achieve their goal?

I'm picking it wouldn't.

For a start -- people (especially programmers) make mistakes.

The newer a piece of code is, the greater the chances it still contains bugs that could be exploited to gain unauthorised access to data or critical processes. One only has to look at the new versions of Windows when they're released to see this.

By writing a brand-new OS, the Indian government will in effect be making it much easier for savvy crackers to find holes and exploit them.

Of course this presumes that there is actually one out there who's even remotely interested in attacking the Indian Government infrastructure.

On the plus side, such an OS would be a very small target -- so small in fact that I doubt it would attract the usual army of script-kiddies and evil little sods who get their kicks simply from defacing websites and annoying legitimate users.

However, political enemies of the Indian Government might just have a field-day finding and using the holes that will be an inevitable part of any "brand new" operating system.

Given the huge cost of developing a suitably robust and powerful OS, as well as the even larger cost of writing apps specifically for that platform, I think the Indians are engaging in a folly with these plans.

They would be far better off simply using an off-the-shelf Linux distribution -- or even tailoring one to their specific requirements. At least that way they'll have a mature platform right from day one.

Of course the counter-argument is that there are an awful lot of programmers in India so it does represent the use of a "natural resource" in an innovative manner.

If readers were charged with the task of setting up a very secure computing resource and programming resources were no problem -- what would *you* do?

Would you be silly enough just hunt down an old copy of Windows 95 on TradeMe or would you go to the other extreme and do what the Indian Government is planning to do and develop all your own software in-house? Perhaps there's a third alternative? :-)

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