The people behind the $100 laptop feel that business is going to go well…really well. Although this is a nonprofit organization, they expect to sell 100 million of these babies just in the first year. But, since each laptop will have wireless accessibility, they are still concerned with the security on these systems. The remedy? Hire some ethical hackers/penetration testers and let them go crazy!

” If the plan is perfectly executed, Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project will deploy 100 million laptops in the first year. In one fell swoop, the nonprofit organization will create the largest computing monoculture in history.

Wary of the security risks associated with a computing monoculture—millions of machines with hardware and software of identical design—OLPC foundation officials are seeking help from the world’s best hackers to review the full specifications of the $100 laptop’s security model.

“This is an enormous challenge for us,” said Ivan Krstić, director of the security and information platform efforts for the OLPC project in Cambridge, Mass. “Security for these machines is hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on.”

Krstić has spent a large portion of 2006 slipping into security conferences around the world, schmoozing with hackers, trying to recruit computer security experts to look at the design and threat model and provide useful feedback.

“We want hackers to get in touch, look at the documentation, play with the machine, and try to break into it. We run the risk of getting parts of this wrong and that’s not something we can afford,” Krstić said in an interview with eWEEK.”

Read the rest of this article HERE.

It will be very interesting to hear the results from the ethical hackers who performed the tests on these laptops. As this project comes closer to reality, we just hope that they will be a learning tool and not just another target for a hacker to add to their zombie army.

Tags: Hackers