Chrome to be virus-free "It's an idiotic claim,"
Making an Operating System Virus Free
Google's claim that Chrome was designed to be virus-free, I said:
Bruce Schneier, the chief security technology officer at BT, scoffed at Google's promise. "It's an idiotic claim," Schneier wrote in an e-mail. "It was mathematically proved decades ago that it is impossible -- not an engineering impossibility, not technologically impossible, but the 2+2=3 kind of impossible -- to create an operating system that is immune to viruses."
What I was referring to, although I couldn't think of his name at the time, was Fred Cohen's 1986 Ph.D. thesis where he proved that it was impossible to create a virus-checking program that was perfect. That is, it is always possible to write a virus that any virus-checking program will not detect.
This reaction to my comment is accurate:
That seems to us like he's picking on the semantics of Google's statement just a bit. Google says that users "won't have to deal with viruses," and Schneier is noting that it's simply not possible to create an OS that can't be taken down by malware. While that may be the case, it's likely that Chrome OS is going to be arguably more secure than the other consumer operating systems currently in use today. In fact, we didn't take Google's statement to mean that Chrome OS couldn't get a virus EVER; we just figured they meant it was a lot harder to get one on their new OS - didn't you?
