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One of the fundamental problems with computer and network security is that we are trying to bolt it onto systems that were not really designed for the purpose. Although Unix doesn't do a bad job, a vastly better one is clearly possible. We though we'd mention a few things that we think might improve matters in the future.
The first one we should mention is the NSA's Security Enhanced Linux. This is a version of Linux that allows very fine-grained access control to various resources, including files, interprocess communication and so forth. One of its attractions is that you don't have to change your way of working completely to improve your security. Find out more at http://www.nsa.gov/selinux/.
EROS is the Extremely Reliable Operating System. It uses things called capabilities (not to be confused with POSIX capabilities, which are something else entirely) to give even more fine-grained control over absolutely everything. We think that EROS is a very promising system that may one day be used widely for high-assurance systems. At the moment, unfortunately, it is still very much experimental, though we expect to use it seriously soon. The downside of capability systems is that they require you to think rather differently about your programming — though not so differently that we believe it is a serious barrier. A bigger barrier is that it is almost impossible to port existing code to exploit EROS' capabilities properly, but even so, using them in conjunction with existing code is likely to prove of considerable benefit. Read more at http://www.eros-os.org/.
E is a rather fascinating beast. It is essentially a language designed to allow you to use capabilities in an intuitive way — and also to make them work in a distributed system. It has many remarkable properties, but probably the best way to find out about it is to read "E in a Walnut" — which can be found, along with E, at http://www.erights.org/.
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