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Would You Use SELinux?
silent_tyr asks: "I am going to re-install my Linux box and being security conscious I am looking for a secure distribution. After a couple of Google searches I found a version called Secure Linux, which sounded ideal. So I followed this link, which turned out to be what I assume is a genuine NSA web-site. All in all, it looks like a good idea and I can play around with it as I wish, but eventually I will be using this machine as my base-system. So before I start I want to ask two questions:
1) Do you think that it is a good idea to trust the NSA not to put in back-door/spy-ware type code to enable them to snoop my personal information? 2) What other security-patched distro's can people recommend? I don't want to open up the floor for generic NSA-bashing, but I also don't want to have to work my way through every line of code before I install." There was a similar question that was asked a while ago, but there wasn't much to the discussion. For those of you who are running SELinux, what have your experiences been, so far?
Holy Welcome to Last Decade, Batman.
Just install Windows XP like everyone else. Stick the free version of ZoneAlarm on there, and you will be as secure as any box out there!
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Do you think that it is a good idea to trust the NSA not to put in back-door/spy-ware type code to enable them to snoop my personal information?
Am I mistaken, or is SE Linux not a source distribution?
GPL'd source guarantees that nothing lives in your kernel that you cannot examine as much as you like for backdoors.
It's a powerful guarantee, one that cannot be made of many commercially produced operating systems, whether they are called "secure" or anything else.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Check out EnGarde Linux.
Also, LinuxSecurity.com is a very helpful and informative site.
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
grsecurity
LIDS
As far as the NSA planting a back door into SELinux, I really doubt it. A backdoor in open source code would be discovered eventually, and the NSA would have a very hard time denying it.
It seems much more likely that they would put back doors into closed source products, which do not receive as much scrunity.
IIRC, it's a series of kernel patches and some modified basic utilities. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more to it than when I first looked at it a couple of years ago.
;) amount of work?
But as to NSA backdoors, honestly, how much intel would they gather from the handful of people who would install SELinux? Wouldn't it make way more sense to crack into Microsoft's source code (if a Russian hacker could do it, well, I'm sure they can) and do it in a closed-source, widely adopted OS?
Hey, I'm as much a conspiracy theorist as the next mildly-intelligent person who sees strings pulling the marionettes in our government. But it ultimately comes down to a resource allocation issue. Why bother when there's so much more to be gained with the same (or less, if you consider the need to somehow disguise the backdoor in open code!
Now about those microwave towers...
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
I personally have a great deal of respect for the folks at the NSA. I am also quite aware of their abilities, and let me say this if you are going to hand teh keys to your system to any one organization you might as well hand them over to the NSA becasuse they already have them.
Seriously I work in the security field, and have worked closely with all kinds of govt. operatives from local, state national and even foreign groups in my various and sundry dealings. Nobody and I mean NOBODY has the smarts/ ability / computational facilities as the NSA. The only other group I hold in such extreme regard is Mosad
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
IMO, the bigger question is: "will the extra security measures get in the way of doing what you need to do?" And probably the corollary: "If you're going to have to disable any of those features, is it still worth using this distribution?"
Check out my eclectic infosec blog at InfoSecPotpou
Hum, so you ask us, who you don't know, which developers, who - in most cases - you nor we know either -, to trust? Maybe you are an NSA agent in search of backdoor-free distributions? Why should we trust you, sir?
Seriously, short of a full code audit, you can never be sure. Security is a process, and not something you can install. I thought that was commonplace around here.
--
"Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple."
Does it -have- to be Linux?!?
SDF (the free shell-provider) switched -from-
Linux... after a security breech...
OpenBSD is claiming to have had:
"Only one remote hole in the default install,
in more than 7 years!"
That's not too bad IMO.
And... if you -really- itch for Linux...
you can always put it on a box -this-
side of an OpenBSD box (ie away from
the Internet...)
First off, which is more likely- that you have information that the NSA is curious about on your machine or that some random loser with test it for various vulnerabilities? If I remember correctly, the idea behind the NSA distro was to provide a free, secure solution to slow or stop the DDOS attacks and the like. If you have anything that the NSA would REALLY be interested in, other then a pron stash that everyone else has, (meaning actual illegal, get-you-jail-time stuff) why on earth would you put that on a machine conencted to the internet? Put it on a separate machine behind a firewall and encrypt it if you are that concerned about it.
% man diff
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
After exaustive code riview of the LSM patches I have discovered a backdoor in the PAM module re-write lin...
excuse me, there's some at the door. brb.....
thers no suh thig as backdoor in seLinux, he was joking.
In teh event of an actual emergency this space might provide useful information.
The moral is obvious.
You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
SELinux is directly supported under Gentoo.n ed/selinux-qui ckstart.xml
See
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/harde
for details on installing.
Or dig on the mailing lists for a recent post to gentoo-dev about it for a lot more information.
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
Though you expressed it with humor, the point is very valid. Doing a diff on to kernel source trees that kicks out 50k lines of code sounds like reading enough, but in many cases of a 10 line change, you'll have to read a good chunk of the rest of the module to get the proper context.
/. this question, you have no chance in hell of catching them.
Additionally, all this is in the realm of seriously expert shit. If the NSA put in a backdoor like
if (connecting_socket->IP == 152.63.39.37) {
connecting_socket->priv_level = GODLIKE;
}
You're in luck.
In most other cases a backdoor is just a hard to exploit/spot vulnerability like a stack overflow, or an awkwardly cast variable assignment that allows the tricky person to assign values to the target varible that are outside it's normal range and have a desirable side effect. If you wrote the modules in question these things would be noticable, if you're a full time kernel coder, they would be possible but hard to spot. If you're asking
The Linux From Scratch suggestion above seems like the most user accessible way to go. I would trust the good will and intentions of individuals over any government's institutions every day of the week.
Debian also includes SELinux, and the "details for installing" seem to be: 'apt-get install selinux'. :)
So, that's at least two major community-oriented distros that have found SELinux worth offering on at least an optional basis; two communities of sometimes-paranoid developers that have probably at least scanned for obvious backdoors. Given that, I suspect that SELinux can probably be considered reasonably safe. (At least as safe as anything else available with your system: when was the last time you reviewed KDE or GNOME for potential backdoors?)