Two headed hard disk

[i]

Is this as pointless from a security perspective as I think it is?

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,102881,00.asp

Why not just use a hot-swap SCSI drive with a write-protect jumper?

 

[Will Rickards WT]

Pointless? not sure.
To make any sense I think the separate head circuitry gives two separate interfaces. One is hooked up to an admin machine. The other is hooked up to the server itself. The question then becomes, doesn't IIS need to write some stuff?

Say the server got hacked. The hacker couldn't write to the disk. Big whoop you say, just hack IIS to serve from a memory partition you create.

All in all, technical details are sparse.

I think to do this right you need a server built from the inside out as read-only, from the memory system to the storage subsystem.

 

[Buck]

Good point Will. Plus, some hacks are just reads, such as confidential information (e.g. credit cards, employer data, social security data).

 

[Cliptin]

Good point Will. Plus, some hacks are just reads, such as confidential information (e.g. credit cards, employer data, social security data).

It would be just as good not to meantion cheaper to have the development machine not attached to the internet. Nightly file comparisons could be run against the internet available machine and restore modified files as necessary.

 

[time]

It would be just as good not to meantion cheaper ...

No, no, no! This is IT. Stop being sensible.