Linux being secure is a common misconception

https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html

by WallyFunk • 3 years ago

81 118 3 years ago

madaidans-insecurities.github.io

1970-01-01• 3 years ago

Linux being insecure is also a misconception, because its so damn fragmented. Only when a Linux flavor matures does it become a target for hackers.

schmorptron• 3 years ago

similar to the old memes of windows 8 being malware proof because it's incompatible with most of it?

rolph• 3 years ago

so should we all switch to whonix ?

TrueDuality• 3 years ago

iOS being secure is also a common misconception. A bit of an extreme example but that is a meaningful problem as opposed to Linux on the Desktop cases.

The problems pointed out in this post are almost all around usability as Linux on Desktop. The author admits the tools exist but are hard to use in most of the cases. Where features are missing its a misunderstanding of the Linux world.

A lot of these protections either live under different names outside of the Windows world and the ones that aren't don't exist because Linux protects things in a different less vendor-lock-in way. This is very apparent in the virtual machine section which are about protecting host kernel primitives from the VM... Linux doesn't expose _any_ host kernel primitives to the VM. The closest is narrow drivers, properly sandboxed and isolated in userspace, that are minimal and have their own security guarantees.

eBPF is far from a dangerous feature, C is only a dangerous language when that danger isn't managed, and the Linux kernel is top-of-class for managing those features, there is the same root boundary issue in Windows and is a deep source of security problems (root on Linux CAN be restricted through both seccomp and SELinux policies unlike SYSTEM).

Things could be better for sure in the Linux world, but pretty much everything besides secure defaults here requires a level of effort or access to attack that requires full compromise of the machine already. There is much lower hanging fruit that we need to clean up and the funny thing about Linux is that it trends hard toward security and quality over time.

You just have to look at time to fix patches for security vulnerabilities, not just in the kernel but in any packages maintained by security distributions. The author calls out not getting patches back-ported, without looking into the patches that don't get back-ported. RHEL won't backport fixes for features that aren't compiled in for example.

There was a post earlier this week about the CVSS scores being different between NVD and RHEL's bug trackers... It was because the networking functionality of that package wasn't compiled in so there was no possibility of remote execution .

ramshanker• 3 years ago

“I am secure”, ohh well “Xyz is secure”, is a common misconception. Anyone remember the old saying “ given enough time and tools, all locks are broken”.

shzhdbi09gv8ioi• 3 years ago

People used to claim MacOS was so secure you didn't need antivirus. Turns out it was not very popular.

complex_pi• 3 years ago

The macs I support in my private circle run very well without an antivirus. It is anecdata of course but about 15 years of it for several "lambda" users.

gjsman-1000• 3 years ago

Well… I mean, if you consider iOS an operating system, “so secure it doesn’t antivirus” is true for 99.9% of people.

I have personally never used antivirus on Mac. I’ve scanned once or twice with Malwarebytes when something weird was occurring but there was never anything.

asylteltine5• 3 years ago

It is true. I don’t know a single person who runs any kind of antivirus on a mac and I’ve never heard of anyone getting a virus. Does it happen? Sure, there are 8 billion people in the world. Let’s not pretend mac needs an antivirus running like windows does.

theevilsharpie• 3 years ago

(2022)

devit2• 3 years ago

Well, the biggest advantages of Linux are that the OS vendor is not itself malicious (in particular, does not collect telemetry, push advertisements or attempt to restrict your use of the system like Microsoft and Apple do), the OS is relatively unpopular and thus not a profitable target for malware directed to end-users, and it is flexible and customizable.

You need to use VM-based isolation to have good security with Linux beyond that (i.e. use Qubes or a similar alternative).

tw043• 3 years ago

Well, the biggest advantages of Linux are that the OS vendor is not itself malicious (in particular, does not collect telemetry, push advertisements or attempt to restrict your use of the system like Microsoft and Apple do)

Except they do: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/10/ubuntu-pro-terminal-ad

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...

devit2• 3 years ago

That is easily solved by using Debian instead of Ubuntu.

hereme8882• 3 years ago

That's seriously ridiculous. "Ubuntu let users know about automatic updates in the terminal".

It's incomparable to what MSFT does.

greentea232• 3 years ago

Yeah, I don't see how windows or mac could ever be considered secure when you can't turn off telemetry and when the systems are closed source and cannot be publicly audited. Linux lets you be as secure as you need to be. The military for example in extreme cases will compile their own hardened version of linux and run it on a custom hardened FPGA soft core. Having that option makes it an actual engineering tool for security vs. a toy imo.

dataflow• 3 years ago

I don't see how windows or mac could ever be considered secure when you can't turn off telemetry and when the systems are closed source and cannot be publicly audited.

Security != Privacy

Imagine home security monitoring your home 24/7. You lose privacy but gain security.

ndsipa_pomu7• 3 years ago

I think the reason that Linuxes are considered secure is the behaviour that is encouraged amongst its users. With Windows, users are encouraged to install software from random internet sites and there's no central method of updating software (without installing some third party updater from a random internet site).

Also, there's some design decisions made in Windows that lead to poor security. e.g. treating a file's extension differently, assigning it special meaning and then hiding it by default from the user.

calamari40658• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the driver update utilities for Windows which notionally did update all your drivers, but also updates all of your viruses.

darksim905• 3 years ago

I dislike this trope of knocking Windows because of no central method of updating software. Windows software by the very nature has automatic updates, just like Mac, for each application that is installed and well supported (usually). Most applications will check for updates on launch and/or periodically. You could use a third party utility but that just increases the chance of break-age depending on what gets updated. And on a Corporate/Enterprise Environment, all of these points are moot with centralized repositories. The core point is moot in so many ways and shows a lack of understanding of the ecosystem.

The file extension bit is sort of silly as well, as, it's what made Windows as user-friendly and wide spread as it is today. Better that than treating everything as a file and allowing anything to be piped anywhere.

I think the bigger point is the ethos behind the Operating System(s) and the opaque nature of Windows that causes these downstream effects.

sander1095• 3 years ago

Windows has had `winget` as a central package manager for a while now. It works great!

helij• 3 years ago

Thinking about this. Would firing up various VMs via Boxes be similar to Qubes?

pabs32• 3 years ago

Linux vendors and lots of FOSS apps do collect telemetry, for eg:

https://popcon.debian.org/ https://wiki.debian.org/PrivacyIssues

Advertising is indeed much less common but is being explored. There have been some HN posts about the backlash that occurs when it gets introduced.

yencabulator• 3 years ago

Debian popularity-contest is as far as I know opt-in and very innocent compared to most of the telemetry stuff out there. Telemetry by default is evil, but trying to paint Debian as evil is a stretch.

Timber-6539• 3 years ago

Flatpaks don't necessarily aim to sandbox applications by default. They just give you the platform to DIY in the easiest way possible, esp when coupled with Flatseal. If we really want to criticize Flatpaks for allowing access to /home or x11 for compatibility reasons, then we should do the same to traditional applications which are packaged non-sandboxed with the same permissions anyways. And before you say that this is an issue because of unknown contributors to popular Flatpak applications, verified apps from the project owners themselves ship with these same "express" permissions.

As far as I am concerned, no general purpose OS will ever come hardened to max defaults; which seems to be the standard applied for security here.

wly_cdgr• 3 years ago

It is easy for ugly people to be chaste, if you know what I mean

timetraveller26• 3 years ago

Linux may not be totally secure but it is securest of all the viable options.

neilalexander• 3 years ago

Depends on your definition of "secure" of course.

hollerith4• 3 years ago

No, Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and ChromeOS are all much more secure.

grayhatter3• 3 years ago

Android and chromeos are Linux based, so it's very interesting that 2 of your 4 most secure operating systems are linux.

But this is a perfect example of how the premise itself is fundemntally clickbait. The problem of insecurity is unrelated to Linux, but the execution and privilege model of userspace.

calamari40658• 3 years ago

Windows will: spy on you, serve you advertisements, reboot autonomously, destroying your open work, install software without consent, report your browsing behavior to advertisers, literally steal your email password, upload all your files to one drive without consent, forcibly change your default browser, insert aggressive ads for Edge in front of the Firefox download page, show you clickbait tabloid articles in the taskbar.

Honestly I'm not sure how you can consider any of that secure.

asylteltine5• 3 years ago

Chromeos and Mac OS are way more secure. Inb4 “chromeos is Linux” yeah but no, that’s just pedantic.

yesco3• 3 years ago

Half the OP is complaints about Linux kernel security. How is ChromeOS, which uses the Linux kernel, immune from these complaints?

kakaz• 3 years ago

Is Microsoft founding FUD campaigns again?

karmakurtisaani• 3 years ago

Or the usual case of "My OS is tracking me and showing me ads, but you know, Linux is not perfect either."

cal85• 3 years ago

Due to inevitable pedanticism

Pedantry ;)

betaby2• 3 years ago

Meh! From the article "In macOS, all applications require user consent before accessing sensitive data"." Well and once given have access to all "Files and folders Note: Includes: Desktop, Documents, Downloads, network volumes, and removable volumes", absolutely in a same way as in Linux. Additionally when installing packets in Linux I would say you give permissions by answering 'yes' to apt/dnf. Such small nuances between MacOS and Linux are not important. Additionally author ignores the fact SELinux may provide protection from accessing random files by random app.

galad87• 3 years ago

Sandboxed macOS apps have a much finer access control. Only non-sandboxed apps ask for access to such a large part of the disk.

betaby2• 3 years ago

What application(s) do you have in mind? VS code or Chrome on macOS and Linux have the same level of access.

upofadown• 3 years ago

Sometimes things are secure for no particular reason. Something might not do the things you think are important for security but that does not mean that that thing is insecure. There are almost an infinite number of things you can do in the name of security. The failure to do those thing is not evidence of a problem.

So if you want to show that Linux is insecure you have to directly show that it is.

hollerith4• 3 years ago

I think the amount of pain inflicted on the internet by security holes in IoT devices (most of which run Linux) goes a long way to show that Linux is not secure enough.

xorcist2• 3 years ago

That anything is not completely secure is a truism.

In what way? Compared to what?

Linux is not as secure as some research-level operating systems, but that comparison is not very useful for most people. Among mainstream operating systems, Linux contains comparably few surprises.

There's also the fact that, like with much of open source, when the developer's interest align with yours the tools get more effective. Contrary to what you read on the Internet, most actors in the Linux ecosystem take security seriously.

That the article references Spengler and Micay says a lot. That's like referencing the UNIX Hater's Handbook. That handbook was mostly right, but also not very practical. But over time it has done more for unix than most other texts, because it was mostly read by unix developers. The situation with these guys is mostly the same. A lot of the ideas voiced by them has been the basis for new features, just not in the form they were made originally.

asylteltine5• 3 years ago

Compared to Mac OS, Linux is hardly secure, at least without significant knowledge and customization that almost every user has no understanding of.

Veserv• 3 years ago

Compared to a standard economically motivated criminal hacking business that will certainly attack any commercial deployment (i.e. the default threat model). Security exists relative to your attackers, not compared to other security solutions. A cardboard box is a thousand times more resistant to penetration than a paper box, but neither is adequate to protect jewelry.

For software security, a trivial amount of resources like a mere 3 FTEs and 1 elapsed year will almost certainly defeat any Linux deployment. It will also almost certainly defeat any Windows, Mac, BSD, VMWare, iOS, Android, or any other commercial OS deployment. But, just because everyone only knows how to make cardboard boxes does not make any of them secure. And again, even if everybody else only knows how to make paper boxes, it does not make the cardboard box adequate. This is the case even if nobody in the entire world can do it; a cardboard box does not meet the minimum specifications, period.

Xeamek• 3 years ago

You literally have a comparison in the article, which lists security features from both windows and Mac that improve safety in different ways, and that linux lacks equivalents of.

xorcist2• 3 years ago

The article offers no such comparison. It says that MacOS has sandboxing these days. That's good, but it's not a comparison.

The MacOS sandbox is really complex. It's a rule based system specified in XML, and an unknown portion of that complexity is in a kernel module. That's both more attack surface and more room for mistakes than for example Firejail, which the article in turn rules out for being too complex. That's not a comparison.

Traditional Linux software runs with the right amount of privileges. But that's not a fair comparison. Linux is a server OS from the start, which Mac or Windows isn't. Chrome is one example that really takes advantage of all the sandboxing possibilities Linux has. The article notes this as an example of how ChromeOS (which is pretty standard, as Linux distributions go) has much better security (what does that even mean?).

It all boils down to that standard Linux distributions allows the user to download and run unchecked binaries. Well, yes. But that's not more security, that's more like a difference in expectations. A modern desktop should allow for all applications to only access shared data with well defined protocols, but neither Mac nor Windows does that. One that does is Android (which is very much non-standard, as Linux distributions go). Feel free to use that and get your work done. Again, it's a matter of expectations.

Thaxll• 3 years ago

"Most programs on Linux are written in memory unsafe languages, such as C or C++"

doubled112• 3 years ago

"Most programs are written in memory unsafe languages, such as C or C++"

Does that fix it for them?

asylteltine5• 3 years ago

I mean both are true kind of, but a ton of Mac and iOS stuff is written with swift…

calamari40658• 3 years ago

Does the author really not understand what memory unsafe means?

tester7564• 3 years ago

What do you mean? it is right

MaxBarraclough• 3 years ago

It would be a reasonable point, if it were backed up by hard numbers.

Linux and Windows both offer C++ as a first-class option for graphical desktop applications. They also both offer first-class safe alternatives. Windows has .Net. Linux has, say, Python bindings for Qt and for GTK.

It could be that Linux desktop applications are more often written in unsafe languages, but it's not self-evident.

indymike• 3 years ago

This line, to me, caused me to become much more critical of the article:

"such as Windows, which is leaning heavily towards Rust, a memory safe language,"

nick__m• 3 years ago

But Microsoft is currently rewriting major part of windows in rust.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/27/microsoft_windows_rus...

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Microsoft has recently announced 10 million dollar investment into engineering efforts to use Rust as default systems language on Azure, alongside 1 million for the Rust foundation.

Azure runs on Windows.

JB_Dev• 3 years ago

E.g. https://x.com/markrussinovich/status/1656416376125538304?s=4...

asylteltine5• 3 years ago

Mac OS and iOS are beyond a doubt the most secure operating systems. I’m not saying they are bulletproof, but are definitely the most secure compared to anything on the market. Linux desktop is laughably insecure, as much as I love it. Windows? I guess with hardware backed bitlocker(apparently not even the default lmao) is alright.

SamuelAdams2• 3 years ago

People also assume all defaults are “safe”, and that the out of the box configuration does not need to be reviewed.

For example, I just installed Fedora Ashai Linux last night and discovered that the sshd daemon is listening on port 22 by default. Not sure if there was an easy to guess password for that, but it was not mentioned at all in the installer and could have been a big problem if I had not caught it.

Anthony-G• 3 years ago

discovered that the sshd daemon is listening on port 22 by default

Your comment confused me and I had to read it more than once. I’d expect the SSH service to default to listening on the default port and I’d be annoyed if a distribution had configured the sshd daemon to default to listening to a port other than 22.

I’m guessing that your main problem with the distribution is that the SSH service was automatically enabled in the first place (without your knowledge).

SamuelAdams2• 3 years ago

Yes, sorry you are right. My main gripe is that the sshd service was enabled and running by default.

mid-kid• 3 years ago

There's no worse way to be right than being technically right. Most of these points are essentially the state of the art of desktop operating systems, or pure speculation, and the fact that they aren't perfect or widely used yet is usually because of tradeoffs that must be made in favor of usability.

butz• 3 years ago

I agree that "Linux" is not secure, but there must be at least a few Linux distributions that are made as secure as they can be.

PrimeMcFly• 3 years ago

With the kernels devs attitudes toward security vulns, of course it is.

Then again there is stuff like SELinux available which balances things out.

paravirtualized• 3 years ago

It's highly unlikely that any operating system can be as secure as Qubes OS[1], simply by considering the model itself. Especially if using Whonix[2] VMs to browse the internet. It is based on GNU/Linux and Xen.

Each piece of software can be separated into its own VM. It uses read only templates for the root filesystem, making it difficult for malware to persist.

Templates have no access to networking or hardware making it difficult for them to be compromised, AppVMs where you run software can be treated as throwaway and be trivially destroyed after each use.

Dom0 has no access to networking, USB devices and runs no software. Total compromise would require a hypervisor escape.

It is designed with the assumption that you will be owned start to finish.

[1] https://www.qubes-os.org/

[2] https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Qubes

MongoTheMad• 3 years ago

Am I missing something? Isn't SELinux supposed to mitigate/stop the attacks described?

rascul• 3 years ago

Might be that none of that really matters. Figure out what security goals you want to meet for your use case and take the necessary steps to get there.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

The article mentions reducing attack surface several times (in the context of VMs, sandboxing, etc.) but it never considers the ability to reduce the surface of the entire OS (no VMs, sandboxes, etc.). What are other OS that make shrinking the size of the entire OS even easier. Do they exist.

tpoacher• 3 years ago

Placing Flatpak as the top argument on that list to demonstrate insecurity for linux more generally, is a bit like saying your house is insecure if you use a padlock instead of a proper lock, so you shouldn't own a house more generally.

hackeraccount• 3 years ago

I think the two important statements which I think almost everyone would agree with are:

1 - against a resourceful enough opponent a networked OS being used by a human is (probably) never secure.

2 - the biggest insecurity in any OS is the person running it

3 - a knowledgeable person can use / secure any OS to a degree that will avoid 99.99% of the vulnerabilities (excepting point 1)

I like Linux, I tend to think that when I want to increase security on a Linux system the tools are there and work. That said I'm sure that same thing can be said for OSX and Windows.

I do tend suspect that the best of the bunch - out of the box, naive user - is probably IOS. Linux is probably a close second because that naive user will find it harder to create problems and it's just a smaller target because of smaller installed base (and there's a little more heterogeneity among the distributions)

Linux being secure is a common misconception

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