Secure Operating Systems (Microkernels seems to be the future)

cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/17506000

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lack mitigations and patches that are added to linux overtime and it’s security practices while good for it’s time is outdated now

RedoxOS (Written in Rust) got some nice ideas but sticks to same outdated practices and doesn’t break the wheel too much, and security doesn’t seems to be main focus of OS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 seems to be far ahead of game than everything else

Ironclad Written in ADA

Atmosphere And Mesosphere 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, HelenOS, Theseus but I couldn’t figure out how secure they are

Finally there is Kicksecure 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

h3ndrik,

What’s your issue with Linux? The kernel? The userland?

Keep in mind that GrapheneOS is Android which runs a modified Linux kernel, too.

Maybe use one of the other operating systems?

Or less known things like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD or the Hurd kernel? or normal BSD?

Have you tried the more modern hardening approaches to Linux? Containerization / Virtualization?

What’s the use-case and threat scenario?

SecuMiKern,

Both Kernel and userland

Android runs a linux kernel yes but is very far from normal linux distros, it almost alleviate all of problems with linux

Hurd kernel’s concept seems solid but it doesn’t look like actively developed?

OpenBSD might be best choice as you say at least until Genode or something similar become useable

As I mentioned in post Kicksecure plans to harden Linux but is not there yet, For virtualization and containerization there is QubesOS but still that doesn’t seem ideal and it requires some beefy hardware

h3ndrik,

MacOS? It has quite some additional stuff on top regarding sandboxing and fine permissions on the desktop that Linux is still missing.

And with some things I don’t agree. QuebesOS looks like a pretty standard Linux with Xen and a few other things preconfigured (In a sane way.) I do the same with Debian. And I can apply hardening to the kernel. And do sandboxing, set capabilities for processes etc.

Also keep in mind that there are a lot of eyes on the Linux source code, BSD etc… And lots of specific migitations implemented. With other niche projects not so much… That could compromise your security at a different point. But all of that depends on your threat scenario.

SecuMiKern,

MacOS’s security is great but unfortunately not open source

QubesOS’s sandboxing/virtualization is way above whatever you can do on Debian

SecuMiKern,

More info on Atmosphere as I find it fascinating that an OS created for a gaming device got such tight security:

reddit.com/…/mesosphere_opensource_nintendo_switc…

“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.”

AmbiguousProps, (edited )

so far as I can tell (as a reverse engineer and hacker), it has zero security bugs.

There is no such thing as “zero security bugs”, unfortunately. Kind of discredits the rest of what they have to say.

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