The $100 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is
inviting hackers to break test out and even break the security on the upcoming computers. Speaking at the Toorcon computer security convention, OLPC representative Ivan Kristic said the OLPC will create the largest monoculture in history and the it will present some “very scary” security problems.

One huge security risk, according to Kristic, is that new computers will transparently transmit application code from one computer to another. The cheap laptops are meant to operate in a mesh wireless network and if one computer doesn’t have an application, then it can acquire it wirelessly from another computer. Kristic calls this scenario “bloody scary”.

I think this is a fantastic idea and would love to get my hands on one of these laptops…if only I could find out how. I’d love to be able to get a few of these laptops if they were capable of running a security tools distro like BackTrack.

Links:
One Laptop Per Child – http://www.laptop.org/index.en_US.html
One Laptop Per Child Wiki – http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Home
ToorCon 2006 – http://www.toorcon.org/