One security researcher turned operating-system developer is claiming that
Windows 7 and Mac OS X are insecure by design, while proposing her own platform as a model for the bulletproof desktop OS. While swapping rootkit research for the Qubes project, Joanna Rutkowska, founder and CEO of Invisible Things Lab, announced some changes to the company she founded, namely the shift in focus away from security research and onto designing systems that were immune to rootkit by design. Taking a swing at both Windows 7 and Mac OS X, Rutkowska indicates that it makes no sense to continue hacking the two operating systems.
“Don't expect to see any research on how to e.g. compromise Windows 7 or Mac kernel or break out of their primitive sandboxes -- these systems are so badly designed from a security standpoint, that coming up with yet another attack against them makes little sense from a scientific point of view,” she
notes. At the same time, Rutkowska doesn’t rule out security research altogether, but notes that Invisible Things Lab will build attacks “against VT-d, or some CPU exploit, or a Xen exploit.”
In the first half of April 2010, Rutkowska announced the first Alpha development milestone of Qubes OS, a new open source operating system developed by Invisible Things Lab in the past half a year, by implementing the Security by Isolation approach. “Qubes is an open source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing. Qubes is based on Xen, X Window System, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications and utilize most of the Linux drivers. In the future it might also run Windows apps,” the official description of the product reads.
