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Indian OS! What it means?

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CIOL Bureau
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India is writing its own operating system so it doesn't have to rely on Western technology:



India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) wants to build an OS, primarily so India can own the source code and architecture. That will mean the country won't have to rely on Western operating systems that it thinks aren't up to the job of thwarting cyber attacks. The DRDO specifically wants to design and develop its own OS that is hack-proof to prevent sensitive data from being stolen.

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On the one hand, this is great. We could use more competition in the OS market -- as more and more applications move into the cloud and are only accessed via an Internet browser, OS compatible matters less and less -- and an OS that brands itself as "more secure" can only help. But this security by obscurity thinking just isn't true:

"The only way to protect it is to have a home-grown system, the complete architecture ... source code is with you and then nobody knows what's that,"  Dr V K Saraswat, scientific adviser to the Indian Defence Minister said. 

The only way to protect it is to design and implement it securely. Keeping control of your source code didn't magically make Windows secure, and it won't make this Indian OS secure.

(This blog has been republished with permission from the author. This blog post was originally published in Bruce Schneier Blog)

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