Re: Could somebody use SCSH, Sheme, or Lisp to create the "Lispm" architecture.

[Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Joe Marshall <jrm@ccs.neu.edu> writes:

> bear@sonic.net writes:
> 
> > A modern LispM would face a very different environment in terms of 
> > what type of users it was available to. Given the new motivations 
> > of users and developers, and would need much different defenses 
> > against malicious users and malicious code.  I think the separate 
> > memory spaces and permission controls of a UNIX type system are an 
> > absolute minimum for anything that's going to be connected to the 
> > net these days.  Buffer overruns and stack screws can't happen in 
> > LISP, but if you put something on the net, it will have to deal 
> > with all the hostility that anyone can throw at it. 
> 
> www.whitehouse.gov was running CL-HTTP on a Symbolics machine
> *outside* the firewall for many years.  It was never broken into and
> not for lack of trying.
> 
> It is true that the vast majority of crackers and script kiddies
> wouldn't know where to begin to attack the server, and presumably the
> vulnerabilities would be better known if the hardware and software
> were more popular, but the immediate evidence indicates that a LispM
> running CL-HTTP in a shared address space is far more secure than your
> average Apache or IIS installation running in a separate one.
 
Web servers running on MacOS  (not MacOSX) with a shared address space
too are deemed quite secure too.   The absence of a "shell" running on
the OS seemed to be helpful.



-- 
__Pascal_Bourguignon__                   http://www.informatimago.com/
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in reality.