Securing the Amiga – A thought experiment

[Tekoneiric]

The Amiga by it's nature is very insecure and open. If a person wanted to secure the Amiga, they'd really have to start with the early boot control which would allow anyone to bypass OS security. I thought of a hardware solution, a relay disconnecting one of the mouse lines until software in the startup triggered it to reconnect or a keylock triggers it.

Would there be a software solution to prevent a user from bypassing the startup-sequence? Maybe a custom filesystem in the RDB that calls a seperate startup file?

[DanDude]

One method in AmigaDOS, there's a command called protect that sets/unsets bits to allow or prevent reading, writing, deleting, executing along with misc. flags....
You can unset those bits using the command:
protect -

(guys, correct me if I'm wrong--I haven't used this command in a long time since I use a directory utility prg)

where - unsets flags, and + sets flags

if you were to keep the file from deleting or writing I use:

protect s:startup-sequence -wd

and when you use the list command:

list S:startup-sequence

you will see that the "w" and "d" are replaced by "-" (dashes).  If you try to write over or delete, AmigaDOS will not allow it.

[vic20owner]

Perhaps, but it depends on why and how it's used.  Nearly every operating system is wide open if you have physical access to the machine.  I can't think of a single operating system which isn't simple to get into as root/administrator as at the console.  For example, in Windows you boot in safe mode or command prompt.  For Unix variants, you boot in single user mode.

More important security concerns would be things like memory locking, muliuser file permissions, etc, providing that you were using the amiga as a multiuser system.

Since the Amiga isn't really a Multiuser system, nor is it used remotely, there isn't much left to secure *except* a login at the console.  A boot password in the roms themselves would be the only good solution that I can think of.