[haiku] Haiku as the easy-to-use, free, open, secure OS

  • From: Ryan Leavengood <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Haiku ML <haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 6 Sep 2013 13:30:42 -0400

Unless you are hiding under a rock, you have heard about what the evil
American NSA has been up to (as an American, I am ashamed about what
our government has become.)

As a long time Haiku proponent and developer, I see an opportunity here:

Haiku should become the premier, all-in-one, easy-to-use, open-source
SECURE operating system.

I'm very confident that Microsoft Windows is compromised. I don't
trust Apple (though my main OS at the moment is Mac OS X.) Google
should not be trusted either. Even Ubuntu or other Linux distros could
have security issues, intentional or otherwise.

Of course no system can be perfectly secure, but I'd trust Haiku where
we make an effort to be secure more than any proprietary OS where it
is likely a purposeful backdoor has been installed.

I don't think such an effort to make Haiku secure will happen
overnight, or even soon. Overall it is probably outside the scope of
R1. But I think it is something we should seriously consider and work
toward.

Package management is fortunately a step in the right direction. It
allows for creating a read-only OS install, and I think it would be
fairly easy to add some sort of package signing system (preferably
decentralized and open.)

I've thought about our keychain system and intend to build a Haiku
crypto API using the latest and best technologies. While there has
been a lot of fear-mongering, it appears that good old symmetric
encryption is still very secure.

At the risk of starting a massive bike shed, I'm curious to here other
opinions on this and what else we might do to make Haiku more secure.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan

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