Remix.run Logo
AStonesThrow 16 hours ago

Hahaha, oh that is a hilarious attitude, you really believe that F/OSS means that implicit trust can be granted all across the supply chain. That I have access to the source makes a lick of difference in terms of vulnerabilities or exploits that can be found.

Once in college I cited Linus's Law in an impassioned apologia for Open Source. And I was duly corrected. Because Linus's Law really has no basis in reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus%27s_law

The reason Linux has such a model of blind trust in system services and applications is because it was based on Unix, which had an even more naïve model, because mostly, it was administrators and authorized users installing that stuff, there was more top-down monitoring and control, and just a smaller incidence of naked malice.

It's the same thing we see in earlier versions of Windows, or macOS, or the Internet. Look at the Internet in the mid-90s. Was it secure, with all the open source running on it? Hell naw. Every OS and protocol is vulnerable and attacked, and every OS and protocol revises security models based on modern-day threats. F/OSS saves nobody and mitigates virtually nothing.

To answer the GP, sandboxing has to be bolted-in to Linux after the fact. Linux's POSIX model is so old and needs to be so compatible. The only sandboxing in SVR3 Unix was chroot(2), you know? The Docker support and cgroups and virtualization are all new layers, and need careful integration. Nobody says that F/OSS doesn't need sandboxing. Nobody says that F/OSS is so secure that it can deviate from better-secured models. Quite the opposite.

Android and iOS are clean starts, mostly; didn't need to be backwards compatible, so they're tuned to the latest threat models of adversarial computing as you describe. But every single app you install on Linux could be a malware, too. I have no idea what "trusted security" or "untrusted security" are, but they aren't real terms of art in Cybersecurity, and they do nothing to describe the provenance or evolution of Linux security (which often has a lot of unused mitigations such as AppArmor or SELinux that get turned off right quick.)

realusername 14 hours ago | parent [-]

This is kind of a sophism, of course it's not perfect (nothing is) but I'll still trust this model over Android or iOS which have a built-in advertising id, manufacturer modifications I can't even look at and shady processes which have more power than I do.

Security is also a social contract.

skydhash 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Yep, most house doors locks won’t survive a well placed kick, but in a safer community, that’s all people have. But in less trusting neighborhoods, everyone use steel bars on windows and have an additional steel door for every wooden one.

So you still can have bad actors in the package manager model, but something like Adobe who treat user agency with contempt is less likely to happen.

So I trust my distros and its maintainers more than I trust Apple. And Apple already have most of my data via iOS.