RE: Viruses

["Roger Vaughn" <rvaughn pobox com>]

It's an interesting idea, but in practice it isn't enough.  This same
technology is used to sign applets used by web browsers.  Perhaps because of
this, most virii/worms (ok, I know they're different, but the effects are
often the same) don't piggyback on applets.  Yet they still get into Windows
machines myriad other ways.  Other routes into Linux also exist.  A more
general runtime protection scheme may be more thorough.

rog

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mark@hoist.nlcomm.com [mailto:mark@hoist.nlcomm.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 06, 1999 6:52 PM
> To: ats@acm.org
> Cc: gnome-list@gnome.org; recipient list not shown: ;
> Subject: Re: Viruses
> Importance: Low
>
>
>
> > Lauris, I am not sure either of your ideas would really help.
> > Signed packages won't do much good (since anyone could sign one).
> > It might make people a little bit more picky about who their
> > packages came from, but then again, they might just see "this rpm is
> > signed by random key, so it should be safe" and not worry about it.
>
> If gnome.org assigns an official package signer then this would work,
> for gnome at least.  do you know how signing works?  It proves that
> the signer has a specific private key.
>
> Mark
>
>
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