Just because it has a CVE number doesn't mean it's exploitable. Of the 800 CVEs, which ones are in the KEV catalogue? What are the attack vectors? What mitigations are available?
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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The idea that it is somehow possible to determine that for each and every bug is a crazy fantasy by the people who don't like to update to the latest version.
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If I had a dollar for the number of BS CVE's submitted by security hopefuls trying to pad their resumes...
Great reason to push more code out of the kernel and into user land
Is it HURD'n' time?
I think we should just resurrect Plan 9 instead.
Plan 9 is also monolithic, according to wikipedia. For BSD it depends.
I mean, you're right but I still want to see a modernized plan 9, I just think it would be neat.
Ah shit MIT license
Is that bad?
It means anyone including microsoft or apple can use the code contribution or take the entire softwarw and make some modifications and sell it proprietary. Any optimisations or features made by community can be proprietarised
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L4. HURD never panned out, and L4 is where the microkernel research settled: Memory protection, scheduling, IPC in the kernel the rest outside and there's also important insights as to the APIs to do that with. In particular the IPC mechanism is opaque, the kernel doesn't actually read the messages which was the main innovation over Mach.
Literally billions of devices run OKL4, seL4 systems are also in mass production. Think broadband processors, automotive, that kind of stuff.
The kernel being watertight doesn't mean that your system is, though, you generally don't need kernel privileges to exfiltrate any data or generally mess around, root suffices.
If you want to see this happening -- I guess port AMDGPU to an L4?
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eBPF is looking great.
Best way I found it running this command
rm -rf /
Then do a reboot just to be sure.
Good luck compromising my system after that.
FYI This is a joke Don't actually run this command :)
sudo apt-get remove systemd (don't actually run this)
I ran it and followed a documentation to install Void Linux and now it runs so much smoother!
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It won't work without --no-preserve-root
good thing that command won't do anything anymore
That’s a crazy “if”
"if" gcc had a Ken Thompson hack how do you secure checks notes anything
I'm genuinely worried sometimes that a Ken hack has been introduced. I don't know by who, but possibly some government agency. Then again, we also have a Minix system built into the CPU doing god knows what and we just accept that.
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Article for the sake of having an article.
Step one: stop listening to anything from Ziff-Davis.
I mean, this isn't any different for Windows or macos. The difference is the culture around the kernel.
With Linux there are easily orders of magnitude more eyeballs on it than the others combined. And fixes are something anyone with a desire to do so can apply. You don't have to wait for a fix to be packaged and delivered.
Security is not a binary variable, but managed in terms of risk. Update your stuff, don't expose it to the open Internet if it doesn't need it, and so on. If it's a server, it should probably have unattended upgrades.
If it's a server, it should probably have unattended upgrades.
Interesting opinion, I've always heard that unattended upgrades were a terrible option for servers because it might randomly break your system or reboot when an important service is running.
There are two schools of thought here. The "never risk anything that could potentially break something" school and the "make stuff robust enough that it will deal with broken states". Usually the former doesn't work so well once something actually breaks.
Both my Debian 12 servers run with unattended upgrades. I've never had anything break from the changes in packages, I think. I tend to use docker and on one even lxc containers (proxmox), but the lxc containers also have unattended upgrades running.
Do you just update your stuff manually or do you not update at all? I'm subscribed to the Debian security mailing list, and they frequently find something that means people should upgrade, recently something with the glibc.
Debian especially is focused on being very stable, so updating should never break anything that wasn't broken before. Sometimes docker containers don't like to restart so they refuse, but then I did something stupid.
I used to check the cockpit web interface every once in a while, but I've tried to enable unattended updates today. It doesn't actually seem to work, but I planned on switching to Nix anyway.
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Not having automated updates can quickly lead to not doing updates at all. Same goes for backups.
Whenever possible, one should automate tedious stuff.
Thanks for the reminder to check my backups
That only applies to unstable distros. Stable distros, like debian, maintain their own versions of packages.
Debian in particular, only includes security patches and changes in their packages - no new features at all.* This means risk of breakage and incompatibilitu is very low, basically nil.
*exceot for certain packages which aren't viable to maintain, like Firefox or other browsers.
pacman -Syu
Rhetorical question?
Install all the patches immediately.
Crontab dnf update -y and trust that if anything breaks uptime monitoing/ someone will let me know sooner or later.
Don't use cron for that. Use the package managers auto update utility. Plus if you use the proper tools you can set it to security updates only
Air gap.
Honestly it is a valid option for critical systems. It is a bad idea to connect water treatment plans to the internet for example
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