Infosys’s HQ in Bangalore
The Economic Times reports that India’s Defense Research and Development Organization— is this the equivalent of the US’s DARPA?—has set up software centers in Delhi and Bangalore with a charter to develop a highly-secure operating system. The effort would involve partnerships with software companies in both these cities, as well as Hyderabad.
Dr V K Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said that DRDO’s project has the goal to protect data from cyber attacks, and the only way to do that is with a “home-grown system, a complete architecture” this is controlled by India.
This is interesting news, of course. And even if a full-blown OS doesn’t come out of the 50 or so software professionals who are slated to work on this project, there are sure to be viable spin-offs and commercialization of the security technology that’s developed.
(Hat tip to Bruce Schneier.)
Related articles
- Indian OS (schneier.com)
- India Plans to Write Its Own OS (indiatimes.com)
- Indian Military Organization To Develop Its Own OS (tech.slashdot.org)
Maybe the Stuxnet virus came from China and was intended for India.. Iran was a mere collateral damage.. just another possibility that the Indian’s have to take seriously. China is a rogue country, it just plays in a different league than North Korea, Pakistan and Iran… all countries China is very friendly with…
That seems to be the implication of Seymour Hersh’s latest article in The New Yorker magazine. Though he makes the distinction between cyber espionage, which has been traced back to the Chinese, and the more alarming cyber war–attacking the power grid– which *may* be on the horizon.
Stuxnet could have come from a government but one of the points made in the article is that it’s difficult to control this kind of attack, and it turns out that India and China were hit harder. I’m not sure how he knows this. One of the ways to defend against both cyber espionage and and cyber attacks is mandated encryption, forcing corporations to encode all their internet communications. And there’s talk, according to Hersh, of encrypting the power grid.
Here’s the link to the Hersh article:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/01/101101fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all
–Editor