Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
1–10 of 190 posts
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#2Feeling mighty smug about my preference for tiling window managers and minimal distro choices.
But I shouldn't, they found bugs in software I use daily (ffmpeg for example), it would be relatively trivial to make me execute something with it, since my brain is trained to 'exes as threats' not mp3s.
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#3Important bit is on the later slides: Issues on most codecs/parsers can be prevented by sandboxing. An exploding parser should never affect other processes, files, etc.
Seccomp (bpf version) is only available since 2012 really, but I hope more apps will start picking it up. It's pretty simple it should become a shameful thing not to use it in new apps.
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#4I believe in sandboxing, I hope it gets better and easier to use.
I work on several C programs. I wish for the day when we have an easy to use, cross platform method of setting up a small set of open files at the start of a program, then be able to say "No more file access, no more network connections".
I know this hides a whole bunch of complication, which is why it's hard and why there are so many ways to do it -- I view it the same way as the move to distinct virtual memory spaces for each process. Once we have it we'll wonder why we ever allowed every program free access to the whole file system for it's entire life-span by default.
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#5Feeling mighty smug about my preference for tiling window managers and minimal distro choices. But I shouldn't, they found bugs in software I use daily (ffmpeg for example), it would be relatively trivial to make me execute something with it, since my brain is trained to 'exes as threats' not mp3s.
Selinux / apparmor / grsec-rbac can do wonders here. Your MP3s should not execute new code and your system can enforce it.
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#6I mean, the answer is unequivocally, without the slightest doubt, yes. The Linux Desktop is probably a good 5-10yrs behind Windows 10 in terms of defense-in-depth mitigations as well as exploits in common targets like file parsers etc etc.
https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-16/materials/us-16-Weston-W... is a good reference for all the stuff that Desktop Linux in 2017 is for the most part, missing
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#7Speaker here.
As the slides may not tell the whole story (there should be a video soon), I covered this mostly also for LWN recently:
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#8I believe in sandboxing, I hope it gets better and easier to use. I work on several C programs. I wish for the day when we have an easy to use, cross platform method of setting up a small set of open files at the start of a program, then be able to say "No more file access, no more network connections". I know this hides a whole bunch of complication, which is why it's hard and why there are so many ways to do it --…
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Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#9I believe in sandboxing, I hope it gets better and easier to use. I work on several C programs. I wish for the day when we have an easy to use, cross platform method of setting up a small set of open files at the start of a program, then be able to say "No more file access, no more network connections". I know this hides a whole bunch of complication, which is why it's hard and why there are so many ways to do it --…
> say "No more file access, no more network connections".
Re: Is the Linux Desktop less secure than Windows 10? [pdf]
#10I believe in sandboxing, I hope it gets better and easier to use. I work on several C programs. I wish for the day when we have an easy to use, cross platform method of setting up a small set of open files at the start of a program, then be able to say "No more file access, no more network connections". I know this hides a whole bunch of complication, which is why it's hard and why there are so many ways to do it --…
> say "No more file access, no more network connections". Looks like you're advocating OpenBSD's pledge(2). http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man2/pledge.2
That is one thing I've looked at, and it looks great.
Hopefully someone (and it won't be me :) ) will write a library which looks like pledge but wraps all the various things in different OSses (I hear words like seccomp on linux)