Posts by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
(DIR) Post #AePiOA6j6UL7clpgQq by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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Time for an #introduction!I’m a software developer and security researcher. I’m interested in security in general, but my main interest is in reasonably secure systems that people can actually use for their day-to-day tasks. That means fully dynamic systems with a human at the console that are capable of running the workloads humans actually want them to run, like web browsing.At some point I might make a separate post for followers.
(DIR) Post #AePiOBLIVnabSFepma by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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@QubesOS is _not_ the most secure operating system ever. It _is_, however, the most secure operating system that is not only used by tens of thousands of people, but is also used for its own development. The official Qubes OS installation images are built on Qubes OS, and the infrastructure that does this uses Qubes OS-specific features.To the best of my knowledge, no other compartmentalized operating system meets this criterion. @GrapheneOS and various operating systems based on @sel4 are awesome, but they aren’t used for their own offical builds and day-to-day development because they are not suitable as development platforms. To be usable as a development environment, a new OS must:- Be able to run complex, existing applications, such as web browsers, that typically were not written with that OS in mind. This means that existing applications can and have been ported to it if necessary.- Be able to execute code that was just compiled. This is typically incompatible with strict W^X. There are workarounds but they are generally very ugly hacks incompatible with many build systems.- Support spawning tasks in response to a human’s command, and possibly allocating a very large fraction of system resources to these tasks. This means that the system is able to adapt to workloads that were not known when the system was created, and excludes any OS that relies primarily on static partitioning.In short, “Is this used for its own development?” is a very good test to distinguish operating systems that are general-purpose from those that are not. Most general-purpose OSs do not focus on security and most secure OSs are not general-purpose. Qubes OS is both secure _and_ general-purpose, and only another secure general-purpose OS can truly be a competitor to it.
(DIR) Post #Av1d66eGRauykm9wXY by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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@libreoffice @Endof10 Please note that that old computer is likely vulnerable to CPU vulnerabilities that can be exploited by untrusted code, such as web sites.
(DIR) Post #Av1d67r3xUkYUl9g80 by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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People have stuff to get done. Telling users that they shouldn’t run the software they need to use because of security just gives information security experts a bad reputation. It’s our job to give users a way to do what they need to do without horrible security risks.Our job is not to tell people they shouldn’t be playing video games. It is not even to tell them that they need to buy separate hardware for them. It should be to provide them a way to run the games with near native performance without compromising the security of their system, and to make that way so easy that it becomes just how people do things.If we settle for anything less, we are accepting that the systems of a huge portion of the world’s population will never be secure. I am not willing to surrender that fight.
(DIR) Post #Av1d67spquASaFz5tI by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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I would absolutely love to see something like this:Based on Nix or similar.Fully declarative.Building and execution is fully sandboxed, ideally using micro-VMs.Accessible GUI for end-users to use.Signing of both build inputs and outputs.Multiple binary caches that cross-check each other to ensure that if one of them produces a wrong output, it is detected.Does not require root privileges to install software.
(DIR) Post #Av1d68dH4FJYuHiBH6 by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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paging @ireneista because this came out of our recent conversation as an idea to get the benefits of containerization (works the same everywhere, sandboxing, no package conflicts, fixes can be pushed out quickly) without the loss of review that e.g. Flathub encourages.
(DIR) Post #Av1d68dd2vb8vNsSpM by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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also paging @qyliss because this seems a lot like what one gets if one smashes Spectrum together with Nix and Qubes Builder v2.
(DIR) Post #Axor5vCUI4otaCf596 by alwayscurious@infosec.exchange
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@matrix What was the RAID failure? Have you considered using RAID-Z with ZFS?