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Trustix, a Worthy Contender?
Linux.com (also owned by OSTG) is running a quick look at Trustix, a Linux distro designed for servers that focuses on ground up security and stability. From the article: "No operating system can claim to be completely secure. There will always be zero-day exploits, configurations errors, user errors, and other factors that can defeat the best security for any system. On the other hand, it's always good to start from a secure base and then add more security. Trustix provides a reliable and secure Linux distribution that you can build upon. There are no wasteful graphical displays and no wizards to set up your firewall. If you aren't comfortable with the command line, forget about Trustix. [...] That said, Trustix does a good job of keeping your system up-to-date, and if you have the required experience, you'll find that it's a robust distro. As a simple server distro with a high level of security and customizability, Trustix is a worthy contender."
... It's an OpenBSD wannabee without the proven track record?
Trolling is a art,
But there has been major changes in the company behind Trustix as of lately. It was originally developed and maintained by several hard working people in the Comodo branch in Trondheim, Norway (E.Midttun, O.Viggen, C.H.Toldnes).s tix.org/msg03396.html
Then not so long ago, I saw one of the workers at Comodo carrying several computers from their office. Turned out that everyone had been laid off and the Norwegian branch was closed down.
At the same time this happened and for some time there was no information given about the status of Trustix:
http://www.mail-archive.com/tsl-discuss@lists.tru
We still have a few servers running Trustix, but are currently moving over to other distributions.
On top of that, you have several methods of ensuring that the software is correct. The methods that are popular are:
Trustix does some of the auditing of OpenBSD, I believe, which is good. However, no auditing method will ever produce provable security. It can only ever produce probable security.
Linux (and so presumably Trustix) has various role-based mandatory access control systems, which provide a vastly higher level of protection against malicious use by someone already on the system. However, none of the mechanisms I am aware of provide mandatory access controls for packets or memory allocations. I am also very unclear if they provide additional security for shared memory or shared resources (using the P9000 filing system). As far as I know, OpenMOSIX and bproc have no mandatory access control support, so if you migrate a process, the rights do NOT migrate with it. (Also, if one node in a cluster has MAC, it should be impossible for threads to migrate from that to a non-MAC node, although the reverse should work, as MAC restrictions can be added but should not be removable outside of the established mechanism for doing so.)
MAC only appears on a very limited number of *BSDs, and most of those have vanished without a trace. SecureBSD and TrustedBSD are not exactly household names, and even those seemed to be limited to the narrow range of controls that SELinux supports. AFAIK, no other of the Open Source BSDs support mandatory access controls at all.
Note: MAC clusters would be wonderful for public server farms, as they would be a lot simpler and a lot safer than any of the other popular methods used.
Trusted computing and encryption often go hand-in-hand, but driver support for either is abysmal in the kernel. The number of trusted computing accelerators supported by Linux is feeble, and there's only one (RSA) crypto chip, even though many many others exist - and there's even specs and Open Source support for them. Why publicly specced devices aren't making it into Linux is beyond me, as that is the chief complaint of Linux driver developers. The way to reinforce that specs are good is to reward those who publish them. The way to reinforce that Linux doesn't matter is to have no impact.
(A good example is the Motorola S1 chip, for which the complete manual has been online for a long long time.)
Ultimately, until an Open Source system can beat the pants off an ancient closed-source system like Gemini, we've no business calling anything we have "secure" in any absolute sense. In a relative sense, most Open Source systems are infinitely more secure than any comparable system, but that only goes so far. It's about time we bit the bullet and gatecrashed the turf that has so far been reserved for the most secure of military systems.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've been using a Trustix box since the 1.1 release, so I guess that's about 4 years now. I recommend it to people all the time, but no one ever goes for for the same reasons as this parent poster makes their ignorant statement: brand recognition. Trustix, out of the box, is oodles more secure and "safe" than a Fedora or SuSE or BSD box. But, because people haven't really heard of it, they pass it by. Their loss, I suppose -- makes downloading the new ISO easier for me since few folks are grabbing them.
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