A myth is a traditional story which embodies a belief regarding some fact or phenomenon of experience, some are based on fact and others entirely fictional but myths do serve a purpose. The ultimate purpose of myths in engineering is to instill certain understanding, techniques and assumptions into those introduced into the field. For example The Story of Mel http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html and A Story About ‘Magic' http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html However there is one myth that I find would make for far better design decisions when it comes to operating systems: The NEXUS intruder Program. The NEXUS Intruder Program is a self mutating computer parasite. It its initial form, it hijacks critical parts of the system to prevent detection. Then it infects all system software, firmware and user programs. Thus to protect oneself from NEXUS, one must make the system secure against any possible software attack.
Then if one assumes EVERY binary file is infected by the NEXUS Intruder Program, we then must demand the following of all applications and the operating system: Everything must scrub their input and be immune to buffer overflow attacks, aka proper software design. All code must be simple such that obviously there are no deficiencies or weaknesses. Full source code must be used at all times [NO binary libraries], this also will provide performance advantages and eliminate the need for run-times. No dynamically loaded code or libraries No program may run unless it is listed as one of the installed programs and its check-sum matches the one generated at build-time.
