[olpc-software] Authentication, authorization, personalization/imprinting

[Jim Gettys]

On Wed, 2006-03-29 at 16:44 +0530, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

> The other idea (which I'm surprised that nobody else has brought up yet)
> is to authorize dangerous changes to the system using public key
> cryptography.  So all the laptops might be loaded with the equivalent of
> /root/.ssh/authorized_keys which contains a global key, country key,
> state key, city key, teacher keys, etc.
> 

Do not lose sight of the fact that we *want* the kids to be able to mess
with their machines to learn computing.  Ensuring restore of a screwed
up system is painless is I think, job 1.  Locking down the system, the
way we we will need to on servers and shared resources, inhibits serious
learning of computing.

Organizations need to be able to control access to their resources, so
something like this to identify the machine to the infrastructure that
this is a valid laptop will be necessary.

One conversation we've had with a person in the field is that if there
is a way to make the machine non-functional if it is stolen may decrease
theft, if this behavior is advertised widely. 
                                   Regards,
                                          - Jim

-- 
Jim Gettys
One Laptop Per Child