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Cake day: Apr 08, 2024

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I am not native English speaker so sorry for misunderstandment

I didn’t say it’s overall better

I said even though on base level OpenBSD is much more clean and secure than Linux it lacks or lags behind Linux in adding mitigations for security vulnerabilities

And there are far less eyes on OpenBSD so many vulnerabilities don’t get discovered in first place

Any software can be malicious even essential ones just look at recent Xz vulnerability (And it was discovered by sheer chance), OS should have systems in place like proper sandboxing, permissions (Not half baked one like flatpak) …


Linux servers exploit is different than Linux desktop exploit and 1000% different than exploiting Android

It’s general misconception that Android is just Linux but it’s not, it’s like saying Linux is just GCC compiler


It’s not, GrapheneOS is hardened Android check their site for more information

And android is not just linux + SELinux there is much more to it


Server security is not completely same as desktop one, Linux kernel is spaghetti code with very large attack surface, only reason it’s not exploited more is Linux Desktop is not as lucrative target as Windows, Proper sandboxing doesn’t exist and is half assed, Qubes is the only one properly doing sandboxing on Linux

OpenBSD and Qubes seems best solution so far but neither are ideal

Qubes doesn’t address Linux’s security problems it just sandbox/virtualize them and it requires beefy hardware

Fedora Silver Blue doesn’t do anything special really it’s your normal linux distro just immutable and relies on flatpaks (On another note Flatpaks sandbox are easy to break and most programs don’t use it properly)


Their basic premise seems solid, but is it actively developed? it seems to go through long periods of inactivity


Some vulnerabilities are not specific to linux like Heartbleed, Spectre, Meltdown

And even though OpenBSD fix most famous/severe ones, others are not tested or their fix may lag behind


Qubes OS is wrapper around underlying operating systems, so it doesn’t really fix for example Linux’s security holes it just kinda sandbox/virtualize them

Fedora Silverblue seems to be Fedora but immutable so many of linux’s problems still apply


More info on Atmosphere (Open Source Horizon AKA SwitchOS) as I find it fascinating that an OS created for a gaming device got such tight security:

https://www.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesosphere_opensource_nintendo_switch_kernel_now/

Quotes from Creator of Atmosphere:

It is a completely unique microkernel with a cooperative (non-preemptive) scheduler. The kernel is secure – so far as I can tell (as a reverse engineer and hacker), it has zero security bugs. They throw out years of backwards compatibility (they’re not POSIX/UNIX), and they really, really benefit from it from a security and modularity PoV. Horizon’s the only meaningful RTOS with a microkernel that I’m aware of (other than Fuschia). Everything’s in userland – filesystems, gpu (and other device drivers). The OS is capability-based and conceptually all about lots of different processes/drivers (“system modules”) that host microservices. The fact that Nintendo designed such a rock-solid, modular, custom operating system for their consoles fascinates me.

IPC is the hottest hot-path in a microkernel, correspondingly Nintendo marked every function involved in IPC as attribute((always_inline)), this was kind of a huge pain to reverse engineer as a result. In addition, Nintendo implemented “SvcReplyAndReceive” as a single system call that allows a microservice server process to reply to and receive a new message in one invocation. That said, there’s actually less overhead than you think. Past of why FUSE is slower than a kernel driver for FS is because FUSE has to talk to the kernel to do filesystem stuff, so when you read a file you have your process -> FUSE -> kernel -> hardware. In comparison, on Horizon the kernel is completely uninvolved in filesystem management (it doesn’t even have the sdmmc hardware mapped). Thus processes will do process -> FS system module process -> hardware.

In Horizon, everything is very distinctly not a file. There’s no global filesystem paths the way that unix/linux have special /dev/whatever. Pipes don’t exist in Horizon – all IPC is done via the horizon ipc (“HIPC”) protocol. UNIX/POSIX have stuff like fork() and child processes…but creating a process is an incredibly privileged operation in a capability-based operating system. Fork() is impossible to implement in Horizon, all threads are created via SvcCreateThread() instead. Child processes aren’t a thing that exist.


Secure Operating Systems (Microkernels seems to be the future)
I am not satisfied with Linux's security and have been researching alternative open source OS for privacy and security So far only thing that's ready to use is GrapheneOS (Based on Android) but that's not available on desktop (Though when Android release Desktop mode it may become viable) Qubes OS is wrapper around underlying operating systems, so it doesn’t really fix for example Linux’s security holes it just kinda sandbox/virtualize them OpenBSD is more secure than Linux on a base level but lack mitigations and patches that are added to linux overtime and it's security practices while good for it's time is outdated now RedoxOS (Written in Rust) got some nice ideas but sticks to same outdated practices and doesn't break the wheel too much, and security doesn't seems to be main focus of OS Haiku and Serenity are outright worse than Linux, especially Haiku as it's single user only Serenity adopted Pledge and Unveil from OpenBSD but otherwise lacks basic security features All new security paradigms seems to be happening in microkernels and these are the ones that caught my eyes None of these are ready to be used as daily driver OS but in future (hopefully) it may change [Genode](https://genode.org/) seems to be far ahead of game than everything else [Ironclad](https://ironclad.nongnu.org/) Written in ADA [Atmosphere And Mesosphere](https://github.com/Atmosphere-NX/Atmosphere) Open Source Re-implementation of Nintendo Switch's Horizon OS, I didn't expected this to be security-oriented but seems like Nintendo has done a very solid job Then there are [Managarm](https://github.com/managarm/managarm), [HelenOS](https://github.com/HelenOS/helenos), [Theseus](https://github.com/theseus-os/Theseus) but I couldn't figure out how secure they are Finally there is [Kicksecure](https://www.kicksecure.com/) from creators of Whonix, Kicksecure is a linux distro that plans to fix Linux's security problems if you know of any other OS please share it here
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