Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

Computer security can be solved by using capability based security. Virtual Machines and containers are just improvised crude versions of it.

We've got about 5 more years before everyone catches on to that fact, and things start to get better.

The insecurity of general purpose computing has been a major factor in the walled gardens that most people stick to when using the internet.

People don't realize the freedom we had back in the MS-DOS days when you could write protect your OS and try ANYTHING in almost perfect safety.

View on HN

Computer security cannot be solved with any technology unless you want to fix everybody in the world to be "good players". This will always be a hopefully balanced game between people trying to protect a system and people trying to get access to it/information.

As long as there will be people that want to hack a system, that system will never be secured 100%.

Here is one example: There is such a thing as hacking air gapped systems. So there is no amount of containers that you can add to protect you from bad actors.

Computer security cannot be solved as long as the users don't understand the decisions they are making, so that will never happen. Walled gardens exist to remove those decisions, so that users can't hurt themselves.

Imagine a wallet with cash in it... Ariel opens her wallet and takes out a Hamilton ($10 USD), and hands it to Beth. The most she can lose is the $10.

In this scenario, the most Ariel can lose is that $10, no matter how evil Beth is. If Eva manages to impersonate Beth, still the maximum loss is $10. In no manner can the balance of Ariel's wallet be lost.

If you have an operating system that never hands over the wallet to an application, but instead uses capabilities, in a clear and transparent manner, then the user is quite capable of doing the right thing, as millennia of experience have shown.

Our current crop of OS choices don't even make it possible to select and built a capability on behalf of the user. There is no "wallet" analogy without capabilities. We're living in a world where you must hand over your wallet to anyone to complete a transaction... which is nuts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com