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Jonathan Melhuish wrote:
David Pithouse wrote:However the security measures in place for cars, terrorism etc are put in place by the government/large companies, therefore is the linux community going to have put this security in place, I mean I am yet to meet a person which has fitted there own airbag in there car.
The primary security measure for cars is the requirement to have a certificate of competence, which these days requires you to have a vague idea what all the bits under the hood of the car are, and has always required you to ensure the vehicle is roadworthy.
Interesting that you use the future tense. As far as I can see, linux (well, UNIX to be fair) was built from the ground up for security. So not only does it have a rollcage, it has plenty of airbags (which you can switch on and off as you see fit).
I think most Unix and Linux systems provide and default to pretty basic security levels - they typically have auditing, user authentication, and ownership of key resources. The Unix security model sucks, and retrofitting ACLs on top of it may be an improvement but it isn't ideal. Personally I think some recent Microsoft operating systems have better security features - although maybe trying to make it backward compatible to a system without user authentication, permissions, etc wasn't Microsoft's finest hour (or three years of hard programming). There is a clear lesson here, it isn't the number or sophistication of security features that make systems secure, but how you use them. Nightclubs still primarily enforce security by employing big people, and standing them at the door. This approach is neither sophisticated or feature ridden, and fails primarily because whilst they stop drunk people getting in, they don't stop people getting drunk inside (so like a firewall). We could build an email client for GNU/Linux that makes doubleclicking on executable attachments sufficient to run it <single click surely>, and if we had a monopoly position we could force every Linux vendor to bundle it on every desktop ....ah I see a flaw with my plan to take over the world foiled again..... Similarly the Sasser worm was primarily down to enabling services that don't need to be (ack of firewalls?), but also "Stack-based buffer overflow". http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CAN-2003-0533 Unix systems provide varying levels of protection against stack based buffer overflows, but it certainly isn't as common or widespread as one might hope. Whether it is enabled on your Linux box depends on kernel version, vendor (Fedora has "exec shield" in some releases for example), processor. My guess is most Linux boxes are still basically vulnerable to one of the oldest and most common vulnerability known to software engineers, even on processors where basic protection for this in hardware is available. The May 2003 "stack exec" discussions showed some of our best Linux minds weren't as current as they should have been on where this is available. Whilst I think Linux is more secure than Windows, the main reason we have so few worms is down to lack of numbers, better defaults, better admins, more diversity. If as Microsoft plans to - they kill many common vulnerabilities by enabling such protections - they will substantially close the security gap (gulf?). Fortunately for the free software advocates (and the crackers) Microsoft seem to be creating structural weaknesses in their new products as fast (faster?) as they fix them in the OS, and lack of competition means these new products will soon be supporting enterprise critical applications that affect all of us.
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