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Cake day: April 8th, 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) …




  • 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)





  • 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.