Remix of "This is fine" by David Revoy (@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org) − CC-BY 4.0

Context

Year of the Linux desktop when the years of neglecting security comes to bite them

... Compared to what?

MacOS, iOS, GrapheneOS (and even then, Graphene doesn't believe themselves to be doing enough due to the fundamental limitations in AOSP)

There is one distro trying, and even they make it clear that they're bound by the limitations of the Linux desktop's security model at the moment (SecureBlue).

It is also technically possible to harden Windows to become nearly bulletproof but that usually requires third party software like ThreatLocker.

A true turfblaster found in our midst.

What is a turfblaster? I'm confused but maybe someone can explain that to me

Hi Pepper! Everything's fine there?

MacOS, iOS

Do you have a source for that beyond shills and their marketing?

There most definitively are vulnerabilities and backdoors in these OSes. Whether or not we hear of them doesn't prove otherwise

My source is primarily the GrapheneOS team's praises for how Apple handles iOS, particularly in Lockdown Mode. There was also a recent situation where they warned their users of "mercenary spyware" attacks.

It's also a position that many in the SecureBlue community would agree with, which is where I've learned the majority of my recent security stuff from.

I played SuperTuxKart before. Is pepper a mascot somewhere, or is it a character for SuperTuxKart?

I do not understand the joke.

David doesn’t want anything to do with the Linux Foundation anymore because they used AI generated art for an ad/promotion thing.

It had a blue cup with a tux on it in it and a big tux with a 35years head, which I put on Pepper’s cup. It also had a bunch of hallucinations in it

It’s a comic https://www.peppercarrot.com/ licensed under a Creative Commons license and made with Krita

Maybe it is someone who blasts astroturfing? Idk

I kinda agree with him as an artist. It makes me sad to see people generate art with ai when they could've made a noobie drawing that will still be far much better than the ai one. Ai art can be so weird as well.

I mean I guess following the messaging of one of the only explicitly security-focused Linux distros is considered "astro turfing" then? Hmm.

From their site directly:

secureblue is for those whose first priority is using Linux, and second priority is security. secureblue does not claim to be the most secure option available on the desktop. We are limited in that regard by the current state of desktop Linux standardization, tooling, and upstream security development. What we aim for instead is to be the most secure option for those who already intend to use Linux. As such, if security is your first priority, secureblue may not be the best option for you.

If security is your FIRST priority, they outright say their work is limited. So... that's where I'm getting it from.

I mean it's commendable that Apple makes an effort to keep their users secure from third-party attackers (besides MDM software), but there's just no telling how much control and privacy violation is going on when they're keeping their source code secret. ("What do they have to hide? Clearly something.")

SecureBlue seems interesting, though most of their features look like security theater compared to the default

Suppose this is a fair point. The stuff that is exposed seems to be quite helpful, such as already integrating features like Global Privacy Control long before Google.

As for SecureBlue... a lot of it seems quite extreme even for me but they're doing good work overall. I was maining their browser for a bit until I realized I was fighting against the current to make it usable for my use case and I felt kind of dirty doing all that to their excellent baseline. But I did grab their sysctl config, commented out 3 or 4 that I didn't need, and inserted it into my own. I like having more control, but I'll gladly take a more secure option if it doesn't affect usability significantly, so I cherrypick fixes liberally from their setup.

If security is your first priority you really just gotta stop using a networked computer, and even an airgapped one would be risky

Yeah my primary aim is closer to something secure enough to be protected as long as I am careful, but still usable for modern stuff. My desktop setup has finally gotten to a place I like, but mobile has been really difficult for me, and I genuinely wish I had the privilege to get into the GrapheneOS world.

After all these decades.
The year of the gnu hurd.

Linux the kernel =/= Linux Foundation. The LF is a very corporate organization with millions of donation money from industry sponsors.

Case in point: The online game "Kingdom of Loathing." I played that in like 2006 and the little martini stick dude still stands out.

Astroturfing. Pretending to be grassroots but just being a corporate shill to be for or promote corporate services and products.

Turfblaster is a word for someone who astroturfs.

At the moment I've settled on Fedora with cherrypicked SecureBlue hardening, to me that is a lot more balanced for my needs. Tails is something I've dabbled with, but I'm not sure I need total anonymity, I basically never use Tor for anything but it's nice to have something like that on hand just in case the need arises.

Qubes is definitely an interesting project though as well, my last ex girlfriend daily drove it and somehow managed to get gaming working on it, and I wish she was still around to teach me how she did it.

Well, it's more so that I wished the open source community wasn't as averse to implementing a security model that wasn't heavily reliant on the systems being obscure. Security through obscurity is a horrid way to do such things, but it seems like that's the way things were done before I got here.

It would be nice to see the vision of the SecureBlue project come through elsewhere in the desktop Linux world, but any time someone so much as hints at fixing the flagrant security issues of something like the AUR, all they get is dismissal and knuckle dragging in response. I'm not a blind shill for corporate products by any means, I just would like for the community to quit treating security as an afterthought, because it's truly needed if we want to keep the new converts safe from the looming threats that are coming day after day.

Acknowledging the successes of projects that just so happen to not be community driven isn't shilling inherently and I'm a little perturbed at that conclusion you immediately jumped to.

Linux is used in security contexts. What do you think Kali Linux is for? There's a linux distro that is literally a hypervisor to separate everything into VMs (Qubes). Fedora allows you to activate more security options like SELinux (which is also one way Android achieves more security BTW). And I could go on, but it seems you chose to be ignorant before making the claim linux was insecure.

Linux distros babe many flavors and eachallows a different focus.

Many desktop Linux distros have poor security defaults. Fedora even disables the restrictions on ptrace by default, which is strange considering the browser sandbox needs ptrace restrictions in order to function properly. Debian and Ubuntu default to apparmor which is very insecure (remember crackarmor?) and Arch has basically no security ootb and the AUR is essentially NEEDED in order to use it for most things, despite how unvetted and messy it is. Kali is not for daily driving, for the record.

I implore you to read SecureBlue's documentation which is where the bulk of my knowledge has been from. Even Android is not as secure as it could be, there is a reason that GrapheneOS, the pinnacle of Android security, doesn't even consider their build of Android secure enough.

Haha cool thanks for the follow up!

I actually might have deleted my comment because I was like "Naaah they've probably thought of this already and I'm not contributing." 😅

Yeah you had some very good suggestions though, much appreciated :)

Linux allows nearly endless customisation. But when making a desktop distro, you have to weigh convenience and security. You can be the most secure OS on the planet, but if nothing can run because of that, nobody will use it.

Go ahead and try to use Fedora with all security options activated. Give it a try and find out how much you like it. I bet that once you have to resolve your first SELinux issue that prevents you from running your favorite application, you'll start being more lax or drop it all together.

I think already know the answer to this, but which OS do you think is the most secure?

It's really hard to quantify an answer to that final question, because realistically, any OS connected to the internet leaves itself more vulnerable than any OS air gapped, so that's already inherently a tradeoff. If I go purely on a purity test? TempleOS. It's not daily driveable, but it technically wins due to the fact that Terry did not code any network support at all into it.

You're definitely right about the convenience tradeoffs, but some of that shit is just blatantly egregious, particularly with Arch and the AUR, yet Linuxtubers still swear by it and still tell new converts they don't need to be careful, which is ignorance at best and negligence at worst. Even worse are the ones that openly advocate you use an LLM to figure this stuff out. That kind of mindset toward new users hurts us more than many realize.

SecureBlue doesn't claim to be the most secure option, its whole model is trying to strike a balance between security and convenience. It's just that a lot of distros are so far behind that their ideas seem extreme. I ran a Lynis audit on my Fedora system recently and I got a 77/100 score. That's probably enough for the average person, and that was after downloading their sysctl rules from their github, commenting out about 3 or 4 options that I didn't really need, and importing them all into my configuration.

My bad then. I'm sorry I thought you were a shill, but those do come through here pretty often to dump their winblow and crApple dung.

As I said in another response, security is difficult to marry with convenience. You can see it on mobile operating systems where a flashlight app asks for network and storage permissions, and users just accept because they can't be bothered with even reading it.

I too recognise that there is a lot of room to improve, but I'm hopeful that with more attention, linux will become more secure. There will be more brainpower and money flowing into it.

So, Haiku is the way now.
(RIGHT?)

Yeah the real point was that those systems have things in place we could stand to learn from, to do better, and continue to keep people protected. It's a learning lesson we could stand to be more careful.

I'm cynical of it mostly due to the way people respond when you suggest it in cases like the AUR malware. Speaking of mobile permissions I'm impressed with Voyager (my Lemmy client), it asked for literally nothing!

Fedora's choice to have ptrace_scope 0 sure is strange, it seems they had a discussion about it to revert it back to the upstream default of 1.

SEL being important was actually the main reason why in the light of recent kernel vulnerabilities I switched back to openSUSE, after being on Void for a while as inspired by this guide.

That the AUR is insecure lays basically in its name, I really don't get why people would use for anything but the most niche packages.

What Android is doing well compared to Linux is that it has proper per application compartmentalization, whereas *nix systems would require each program to be run by a different user to separate them, though Linux is also improving in that regard, for example through SEL or the flatpak sandbox.

nope. maybe next year, lmfao

And in fact, I frequently have disagreed with the Linux foundation and think it shouldn't carry the name Linux, as most of their projects aren't particularly related to Linux work.

It's been a way for corporations to attach the Linux marketing value to their pet projects for a long time.

think it shouldn’t carry the name Linux, as most of their projects aren’t particularly related to Linux work.

I’d say that’s pretty normal for foundations. The Eclipse Foundation shoulders a marketplace for VSCode/VSCodium and adopted some OS projects. Apache foundation has adopted tons of different projects from IDEs over office software to code forges,

As the creator of the GNU Hurd community, I approve. Prepare everyone's old thinkpads or old dell laptops, and prepare some Ethernet cables.

Yeah I pretty much chose to take matters into my own hands by importing some of the SecureBlue defaults (with a few modifications) into my config.

True, though not a whole lot of people think as highly about Eclipse or Apache as folks do Linux.

I don't think companies are jumping up and down to try to manipulate their way to having nominal affinity to those projects compared to how so many companies want to have the 'Linux approved' impression with people not paying close attention to the 'foundation'.

$YEAR is the year of the BSD desktop