The recently announced Google Chromebooks might have gotten the world to sit up and take notice (especially when Angry Birds is made available for it over the Web!), and depending on which group you are on, there is a very different reason for doing so. Casual consumer electronics users will see it as a new toy, but security experts are much darker in their assessment – touting that a cloud-based OS might just create gaping security holes, and that alone would result in your data being vulnerable to a cyber attack. Now no one would want that to befall them, would they?
Manufactured by Samsung and Acer, the Chromebooks are rather limited in terms of hardware, using just 2GB RAM and 16GB of SSD storage, while running on the Chrome OS, a consumer operating system that relies on cloud technology, making it the first of its kind in the world to do so.
With cloud technology, one is able to reinstall and reauthenticate your credentials to the cloud, letting you restore their information in full and regain a smooth computing experience in the event that the Chrome operating system crashes or end up being infected with malicious code.
Google thinks that its Chromebooks are quite secure as they employ “defense in depth,” looking to multiple layers of protection such as automatic security updates and sandbox technology.
Nothing is secure in the world these days, as those claims have been debunked by researchers at France-based Vupen Security who managed to wiggle their way into Google’s Chrome browser, including its sandbox technology.
Prevention is always better than cure, so do your part well and leave the rest to providence, aye? Just bear in mind that this is all speculation by certain quarters in the industry, so it might not be the gospel truth after all.
Filed in . Read more about Google, Google Chrome and Security.