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

[bhurt@spnz.org (Brian Hurt)]

Pascal Bourguignon <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote in message 
news:<87u1d7o80o.fsf@thalassa.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.

A friend of mine uses an old Apollo DN10K workstation (for those of
you who remember the DN10K) as his firewall/mailserver.  He derives
great amusement watching 31337 haxorz trying to deal with this
machine.  He hasn't be hacked yet...

Is the defense something innate to the system, or just using an
obscure enough machine that the black hat community isn't set up to
deal with it?

Brian