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Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

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Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#151

Post by nickpsecurity »

chris_wot wrote: post #123
nickpsecurity wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As you have guessed by now I am some kind of allergic to this... those idealistic over-simplifications... drawing everything in black and white..." I avoid oversimplifications, too. Yet, most of what the author wrote was proven by precedent. Only grip I have is calling Linux anti-security and anti-privacy given how much good work in those used the platform. Gotta be a kernel by kernel and distro by distro judgment o…

I'm genuinely curious: what do you think of SIP on OS X? Do you think it is effective?

Actually, a response I just gave has important background here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669500

As I went to look up SIP, I found this at the top of the results:

https://threatpost.com/os-x-zero-day-bypasses-native-sip-pro...

So, not looking great so far. ;) Anyway, I decided to look further to find a Wikipedia article on it with what looks to be great description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Integrity_Protection

From what I see, this is Apple's answer to the Biba model for integrity protection that's intended to divide system up into trust levels where untrustworthy processes can't write files they shouldn't. This was in Orange Book B1-B3 & A1 class systems such as Compartmented Mode Workstations. LOMAC model, SELinux/SEBSD, Windows Integrity Control, Argus PitBull, and Trustifier all implement this scheme to protect files integrity.

Let's just say it's a technique that helps but doesn't guarantee security by far. The reason is that the check is in the kernel. That can be bypassed by a 0-day attack on the kernel or below. Trusted processes that manage it might also be hit. Less likely, the person with control over it might be conned into installing something rogue. Seems Apple uses signatures to address that to some degree. So, one tool in the security toolbox just like it was in the 90's for CMW's. Gotta protect the privileged code and interfaces to it to make sure it's not bypassed.

One advantage of Biba and similar models are that they're conceptually simple plus very efficient in storage and CPU time. I think of it as an extra check to fall back on instead of primary protection. Cost almost nothing. Hope this write-up helps in your assessment of Mac security.

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#152

Post by thegeekpirate »

4ad wrote: post #137
niroze wrote: post #85

Great opinion piece. I think this is mostly the opinion of anyone that really discovers OpenBSD and gets caught up in it. Security does matter, and the developers accept nothing less than what they want. My main problem with OpenBSD development is that all development is decided solely by the developers and there doesn't seem to be much care for what others want.. which is fine, they're doing all the work for peanuts…

I've seen this type of comments many times, in many different context, about many different open source software projects, and I never understood them. > all (OpenBSD) development is decided solely by the developers and there doesn't seem to be much care for what others want This implies this is not the case for every other project. To pick on your SMP performance example, Linux doesn't have better SMP because "devel…

There are plenty of projects on Github which implement features based on requests (submitted via the issue tracker).

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#153

Post by bch »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #150
bch wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Mac OS is pretty, well-designed components for GUI/desktop on top of a hybrid between a microkernel and UNIX (BSD). Let's ignore their bad choice of microkernel. Is it necessary to ignore the microkernel choice? Isn't MacOS X -not- microkernel, even though (or "because") it uses an old version of Mach? [0][1][2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_%28kernel%29 [1] http://www.roughlydrafted.com/0506.mk1.html…

Mach was a terrible microkernel because it tried to do too much. Good examples for you to look up are QNX, L4 (esp OKL4), EROS, and Minix 3. These all get stuff done more reliably, securely, and faster than Mach. That they've built so much into the Mach model means anything you do to improve security or performance has to fight with its inherent weaknesses. So, Mach is its own discussion of failure in and of itself.…

I appreciate the links. I'm still perplexed though -- isn't the Mach component of MacOS X not at all a microkerel? Are you saying "it sort of is", or "it certainly is" ?

The promises of microkernels seem extremely attractive to me, but we know that the promise of simplicity doesn't come for free (witness Hurd[0]). There were versions of Mach that were high-profile (i.e.: media/developer attention) microkernels, but I thought the Mach in MacOS X really was simply "not a microkernel". Interested to hear more about this if you've got illuminating info.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#154

Post by anthk »

>Plenty of hardware in my life has backdoors (I'm looking at you Intel). But I'm slowly replacing the bad stuff with the good stuff, as I'm able to find OpenBSD (and open hardware) based solutions for my remaining use cases.

Use a blobless OS like Trisquel, Guix and get libre hardware from the FSF.

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#155

Post by nickpsecurity »

bch wrote: post #153
nickpsecurity wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mach was a terrible microkernel because it tried to do too much. Good examples for you to look up are QNX, L4 (esp OKL4), EROS, and Minix 3. These all get stuff done more reliably, securely, and faster than Mach. That they've built so much into the Mach model means anything you do to improve security or performance has to fight with its inherent weaknesses. So, Mach is its own discussion of failure in and of itself.…

I appreciate the links. I'm still perplexed though -- isn't the Mach component of MacOS X not at all a microkerel? Are you saying "it sort of is", or "it certainly is" ? The promises of microkernels seem extremely attractive to me, but we know that the promise of simplicity doesn't come for free (witness Hurd[0]). There were versions of Mach that were high-profile (i.e.: media/developer attention) microkernels, but I…

Mach is a microkernel but Darwin is not. This is what Mac OS X runs on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29

XNU is monolothic software since it (a) merges code like BSD in with the microkernel and (b) has a ton of kernel-mode code in violation of microkernel principles. It can be said that microkernels can still benefit monolithic heaps of kernel code by providing a consistent, simple way for pieces to internally communicate. Windows has a microkernel inside of it for that reason IIRC.

"witness Hurd[0]"

Hurd is another failure. So many microkernels, including commercial deployments, have happened during the lifetime of that project not achieving its goals. Situations like Mach and Hurd are why people think microkernels suck. You have to see good examples. Did you ever use a Windows 95/98 box back in the day? Remember how it would choke trying to do anything intensive or concurrent? Check out what microkernel-based BeOS does on older hardware in my UNIX alternatives list:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020

Tannenbaum has a nice paper describing the two biggest problems plus different styles of handling them. It includes the microkernel techniques that are reason we like them for robustness.

http://www.minix3.org/docs/jorrit-herder/computer-may06.pdf

On capability-security site, KeyKOS had fine-grained isolation, protected communication, and checkpointing of app's state in case of failures. Shapiro's successor, EROS, is described in this document along with many key principles to high-assurance reliability and security that good work must leverage:

http://flint.cs.yale.edu/cs428/doc/eros-ieee.pdf

Note: Unfortunately, project is dead as FOSS contributors had little interest and he got poached by Microsoft. Did deliver a more secure networking stack and GUI system on top of a prototype kernel. COYOTOS project papers have some lessons learned, too.

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#156

Post by the_why_of_y »

vox_mollis wrote: post #20
dijit wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not just that though, there's the push for systemd which was not welcomed and alienated a lot of sysadmin folk who frequent hackernews. personally I felt rather shafted by systemd, not because it's bad, but because my arguments were never even met, it was just a brushing off from some of the people who had already accepted it. So I tried the BSD's and they were significantly better than I imagined they would be,…

Indeed. If systemd were just a parallelized init system with better unit management, far more would be okay with this shift. But that wasn't enough. They had to hijack bootloading, logging, device management, network, etc. For reasons that nobody seems to be able to actually explicate.

OpenBSD's CVS contains implementations of bootloading[1], logging[2], device management[3], network[4], etc. For the simple reason that you need all that to have a useful operating system.

[1] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/stand/boot/

[2] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/syslog...

[3] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/atactl/

[4] http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sbin/ifconfig/

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#157

Post by hackuser »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #149
hackuser wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> thanks to CompSci ... Dumb question: Do you mean the field of computer science in general, or some specific tech or organization that uses that name? The former doesn't exactly make sense, but I've not heard of the latter and would be interested ...

It's not a stupid question since I never define it. :) I had an extended discussion/debate with Kragen a while back on engineering software vs programming it. Many in academia and industry came up with methods to do software like a form of engineering with great results in practice. Sometimes even proving its properties. Whereas, programming was anything from throwing crap together to carefully constructing it in a w…

Thanks!

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#158

Post by xorcist »

hamsterdam156 wrote: post #118
npsimons wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only grip I have is calling Linux anti-security and anti-privacy given how much good work in those used the platform. Gotta be a kernel by kernel and distro by distro judgment on that. That caught my eye as well; lumping Linux in with Windows or even OSX is insulting in the extreme on the privacy front and only slightly less on the security front. To be sure, the focus on many Linux distros is not security at the f…

> Hell, can someone tell me if it's dead simple to install OpenBSD with full disk encryption? Dead simple. Full disk encryption on OpenBSD is a discipline of softraid(4). One bioctl command during the install will initialize a hard disk with true full disk encryption. When I say true, I mean, no separate un-encrypted /boot partition like LVM on LUKS requires.

Fwiw, in GRUB version 2 load the cryptodisk module to enable an encrypted /boot.

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#159

Post by xorcist »

ymse wrote: post #143
nickpsecurity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you're saying it, too, as I get tired of this myth. I wrote a scheme on Schneier's blog for disproving it a while back. Basically, you counter the mitigations which look awfully similar to the one's that got countered in Linux and Windows. Once you have that, wait until a bug is mentioned on mailing list that can lead to memory attack. Weaponize it. Profit. Leads me to what I claim is dirty secret behind "on…

Note: they explicitly state "only two remote holes...", one of which can be found in this very thread. Security problems are usually clearly marked in the changelog: http://www.openbsd.org/errata59.html What really annoys me with OpenBSD is that users are expected to download the CVS source and compile it to fix problems rather than upgrade to a dot-release. For a normal user that's fine, but if you have a bunch of s…

"Only two remote holes in the base install". That's because the base install contains very little in terms of remotely accessible services (only OpenSSH I believe?).

Re: Why OpenBSD Is Important to Me

#160

Post by Sabon792 »

The biggest reason people don't use BSD of any type is that you can't go into a store and buy a computer with BSD on it. At least not in any store an "average" computer user would know where to look.

As for someone like me, I used to build computers (more than a couple hundred) back in the 80s and 90s with alternate OSs to Mac (classic) and Windows but never tried BSD. I did try BeOS and OS/2 and Corel and close to a dozen different Linux distributions (I have the Penguins to prove it).

At the time I didn't know anyone else that used BeOS or OS/2 other than me. Personally I mean. So that isn't my excuse for not using BSD. Mostly I rarely heard about it. Now I'm old (laughing) at 55 and left BeOS and OS/2 behind years ago and moved to Mac Classic and then Mac OS X which runs on top of BSD. That's the closest I've gotten.

If you want more people to use BSD you really need to promote it more. Not just in nerd magazines but put out flyers around companies (don't ask, just leave them) with an explanation of what OpenBSD is and why they should be using it instead of Mac or Windows.

It needs to be brief and clear and you need to make VERY clear how they find and install OpenBSD and not just, "Go out and buy a computer and install it." That's like telling most people, "Go out and buy a nuclear reactor and install for the OS for it." It's not going to happen unless you are clear and you make it as easy for them as possible. People like easy and they want to feel like someone cares and that they will be taken care of if they have ANY questions.

Personally I feel that one of the biggest bad jokes is that "Microsoft cares". Really? Would you like to buy the Brooklyn bridge? Because it's for sale for $1.

If you get everyone you know to lay out flyers at businesses with what I describe above then you may get a few more people to use OpenBSD. But be prepared to support them in not nerd languages and without any attitude. If you have emotional problems (low self esteem, and I'm not saying that YOU do, well those people shouldn't be helping anyone else with anything) then I would suggest leaving support to other people.

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