The $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is
inviting hackers to break test out and even break the security on the upcoming computers. Speaking at the Toorcon computer security convention, OLPC representative Ivan Kristic said the OLPC will create the largest monoculture in history and the it will present some “very scary” security problems.

One huge security risk, according to Kristic, is that new computers will transparently transmit application code from one computer to another. The cheap laptops are meant to operate in a mesh wireless network and if one computer doesn’t have an application, then it can acquire it wirelessly from another computer. Kristic calls this scenario “bloody scary”.

I think this is a fantastic idea and would love to get my hands on one of these laptops…if only I could find out how. I’d love to be able to get a few of these laptops if they were capable of running a security tools distro like BackTrack.

Links:
One Laptop Per Child – http://www.laptop.org/index.en_US.html
One Laptop Per Child Wiki – http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
ToorCon 2006 – http://www.toorcon.org/

According to ZDNet yesterday:

“The open-source Firefox Web browser is critically flawed in the way it handles JavaScript, two hackers said Saturday afternoon.

An attacker could commandeer a computer running the browser simply by crafting a Web page that contains some malicious JavaScript code, Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi said in a presentation at the ToorCon hacker conference here. The flaw affects Firefox on Windows, Apple Computer’s Mac OS X and Linux, they said.”

The full story can be found here and it looks as though the NoScript add-on can help mitigate the effects of the exploit (not a patch…just a workaround).

After I had posted my article on configuring NetFlow export on Cisco devices, various people emailed me asking what, exactly, NetFlow is. It just so happens that Dark Reading has recently published an article on the topic. To explain what NetFlow is:

It is simply the aggregation of packets into “flows” and the reporting of that data. A flow is a collection of packets that can be characterized by source and destination IP addresses and ports, as well as a few more characteristics. The packets in a particular flow are counted and reported to a collector. Cisco and most other routers support NetFlow. NetFlow is used by all the major ISPs and carriers to resolve peering issues and account for whose traffic flows over which network.

Imagine being able to classify all of the traffic on your network into source, destination, and application. You can immediately determine which applications, users, and servers consume the most resources. You may be surprised, as the operators of Internet2 were, to discover that over 90% of your traffic is not business related, for instance. You may find a server that has been infected with a worm for months, spewing packets that eat up valuable bandwidth. You may discover unauthorized Web, gaming, IRC, or Warez servers on your network.

Read the full article here: http://www.darkreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=101496