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Kaspersky Labs preps its own OS to guard vital industry against cyberwarfare
Kaspersky Labs' namesake Eugene Kaspersky is worried that widely distributed and potentially state-sponsored malware like Flame and Stuxnet pose dire threats to often lightly protected infrastructure like communication and power plants -- whatever your nationality, it's clearly bad for the civilian population of a given country to suffer even collateral damage from cyberattacks. To minimize future chaos and literally keep the trains running, Kaspersky and his company are expanding their ambitions beyond mere antivirus software to build their own, extra-secure operating system just for large-scale industry. The platform depends on a custom, minimalist core that refuses to run any software that isn't baked in and has no code outside of its main purposes: there'll be no water supply shutdowns after the night watch plays Solitaire from an infected drive. Any information shared from one of these systems should be completely trustworthy, Kaspersky says. He doesn't have details as to when the OS will reach behind-the-scenes hardware, but he stresses that this is definitely not an open-source project: some parts of the OS will always remain confidential to keep ne'er-do-well terrorists (and governments) from undermining the technology we often take for granted.
IBM to start marketing SecureBlue on-chip crypto
Not a fan of hardware DRM enforcement and trusted computing models? Well, you might want to plug your ears (or pay close attention, depending on how you treat this kind of news), because IBM announced that they'll be marketing future chipset solutions with SecureBlue -- their new take on secure computing hardware (with a specific bend toward locking down DRM for the end user). But SecureBlue's not only necessarily for computers; they also seem to want to launch the technology on "low-cost, relatively low performance electronics." In other words, you might start seeing SecureBlue "protecting" your computer from viruses and malevolent (or unsigned / unapproved) software just like it might also be powering the next wave of lower-power consumptive DRM-enabled portable audio players. Honestly we don't really know exactly what and how, though, since IBM didn't really seem to want to get incredibly verbose or specific on the matter. But you know how these things work, so expect to be hearing the SecureBlue name -- at least a little -- in the coming months.
