Re: [Spud] SPUD's open/close are unconvincing

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 12:15 AM, Toerless Eckert <[e-mail]> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 08:46:24PM -0700, Tom Herbert wrote:
>> I think the kernel/user-land argument is a red herring.
>
> Elaborate please. To me its probably the biggest motivator for
> SPUD. Otherwise we could design all we need into IP and TCP.

TCP should probably not happen in the kernel either. Nor should
printer drivers be in the kernel or anything that does not require the
intermediation of the security monitor.

Looking at the shoot-yourself-in-the-foot opportunities in the IPv6
encoding, I am not exactly anxious to put all those untrusted code
paths in a position where they can root the machine.

One of the main reasons the current generation of O/S are chronically
insecure is that 90% of the stuff that is inside the security
perimeter has no business being there.


At this point TCP is water under the bridge. But that does not mean we
are obliged to remake the mistake.

When TCP was designed, the mantra was 'everything is a stream'. That
was the right abstraction for Telnet and FTP and Mail. It is probably
not the right abstraction for real time web where an unreliable
sequence of chunks seems a better fit.