31–40 of 51 posts
What is considered the most security conscious OS today? What is the most secure OS that can be run without enormous pain? I am about to rebuild my machine, and have been toying with switching to Qubes or Fedora Silverblue + distrobox, but would love to hear if there are better options available today. I install so much developer tooling it seems inevitable that a bad actor can slip in and upload my $HOME. Trying to…
What is considered the most security conscious OS today? What is the most secure OS that can be run without enormous pain? I am about to rebuild my machine, and have been toying with switching to Qubes or Fedora Silverblue + distrobox, but would love to hear if there are better options available today. I install so much developer tooling it seems inevitable that a bad actor can slip in and upload my $HOME. Trying to…
No threat model given. > Adds per-network MAC randomization Where the heck is this thing being used? > Setting more restrictive file permissions (Based on recommendations from lynis) Often results in more code being run privileged... > Brute force protection by locking user accounts for 24 hours after 50 failed login attempts, hardened password encryption and password quality suggestions Introduces a serious DoS vuln…
Security is always a trade off with convenience. Nobody will be installing this distro by accident, so your "who's this for? what is it trying to solve" is a bit misdirected.
With that said - immutable is clearly the future for all operating systems, not just Linux Distros. It doesn't have much to do with security, although that is a side-effect. It mostly has to do with system stability, testability and repeatability.
Ever updated your windows machine and got a BSOD? We all have... immutable means that is very unlikely to happen (because everyone uses the same base OS image), and if it did, rolling back is as easy as rebooting the system.
After you setup your traditional machine, you install various drivers, updates, software, tweak some settings, remove some things - now your environment is unique to only you. This is why complete "base image" testing is impossible with traditional OS'... everyone's is different. Immutable solves that.
No threat model given. > Adds per-network MAC randomization Where the heck is this thing being used? > Setting more restrictive file permissions (Based on recommendations from lynis) Often results in more code being run privileged... > Brute force protection by locking user accounts for 24 hours after 50 failed login attempts, hardened password encryption and password quality suggestions Introduces a serious DoS vuln…
One of the targeted user-groups is clearly people who travel a lot and are on various untrusted networks often (airports, coffee shops, hotels, etc). Security is always a trade off with convenience. Nobody will be installing this distro by accident, so your "who's this for? what is it trying to solve" is a bit misdirected. With that said - immutable is clearly the future for all operating systems, not just Linux Dist…
Maybe that's clear to you.
> With that said - immutable is clearly the future for all operating systems, not just Linux Distros.
Kind of a side issue. However...
> Ever updated your windows machine and got a BSOD? We all have... immutable means that is very unlikely to happen (because everyone uses the same base OS image), and if it did, rolling back is as easy as rebooting the system.
... until you actually want to use it, at which point you're installing software in some kind of user account or application area, and you get to reexperience all the same problems and reinvent the solutions. Except with an extra layer of complexity to separate the "base image" from whatever you're actually trying to use the computer for.
> This is why complete "base image" testing is impossible with traditional OS'... everyone's is different.
Everyone's actual applications and needs are different.
No threat model given. > Adds per-network MAC randomization Where the heck is this thing being used? > Setting more restrictive file permissions (Based on recommendations from lynis) Often results in more code being run privileged... > Brute force protection by locking user accounts for 24 hours after 50 failed login attempts, hardened password encryption and password quality suggestions Introduces a serious DoS vuln…
Only bubblewrap would run as root, but yes this is a fair critique as this is an opinionated tradeoff. I'm considering adding a set of userns variants to give users the choice between the two.
the packages have a bad security reputation
By default we only enable the flathub-verified remote for this reason.
Just more attack surface if you didn't remove Firefox.
We're removing firefox.
... and pushing everybody into a less tested code path. Again, what is this trying to solve?
Around half of V8 vulnerabilities are enabled by JIT: https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Sec...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the targeted user-groups is clearly people who travel a lot and are on various untrusted networks often (airports, coffee shops, hotels, etc). Security is always a trade off with convenience. Nobody will be installing this distro by accident, so your "who's this for? what is it trying to solve" is a bit misdirected. With that said - immutable is clearly the future for all operating systems, not just Linux Dist…
> One of the targeted user-groups is clearly people who travel a lot and are on various untrusted networks often (airports, coffee shops, hotels, etc). Maybe that's clear to you. > With that said - immutable is clearly the future for all operating systems, not just Linux Distros. Kind of a side issue. However... > Ever updated your windows machine and got a BSOD? We all have... immutable means that is very unlikely t…
Sandboxed app environments are easily accomplished today in various ways on Linux and other immutable OS (there's more than you think, including popular mobile operating systems).
The base image never needs to change for any application to be installed and used. Layering is not even a requirement for almost all software to work as expected on an immutable system.
Development is still weird on immutable OS's - since developers do weird things. Currently the solution is pet containers, which are more of a PITA than not, but it does work fine. With that said, modern development environments should not be sprawled all across your system anyway - that's bad for so many reasons.
Regardless, if you would prefer to layer on top of the base os, then you still get the overwhelming majority of immutable benefits.
Immutable is the future...
Most of this can be done with Ansible. So why should I download images from a 3rd party outside of the Fedora project? If you really want to harden an OS with a good SElinux implementation you should try enabling user roles. Last time I tried that was maybe Fedora 20 something and it broke a lot.
I don't understand these spins/release patterns
Most of these several gig ISOs amount to two dozen lines of scripting in the kickstarts
> Anything related to "degoogling" Fedora includes Google components?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a little concerned that degoogling would be necessary. I don't follow. The readme specifically says it's not in scope. How much of the user's privacy is this thing selling away in the name of "security"? Nothing more or less than upstream fedora. The point of putting that in there is to make it so we don't get people opening issues to ask us to switch to Brave or what have you. tradeoff Yes, it's a tradeoff and i…
> I don't follow. The readme specifically says it's not in scope. Let me rephrase: What is your distro doing that would make someone want to degoogle it?
Certain users have expressed a preference towards Brave instead of Chromium because in their view Brave's "degoogling" of chromium is preferable. That line is in the readme to clarify that this is not a concern for the project and not in scope.