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Having a FOSS phone would only be considered trustworthy if it had been reviewed by an entity you trust. I'm not aware of any mainstream OS that has been fully

Having a FOSS phone would only be considered trustworthy if it had been reviewed by an entity you trust. I'm not aware of any mainstream OS that has been fully reviewed for security, so realistically the concept of a "trustworthy" device in that sense doesn't exist. Even if such an audit was done perfectly (a very serious and difficult undertaking), it would be a point in time assessment, so would become less relevant as new code was committed. Basically you have to trust some group of people to run a modern computing device/environment, it's just a question of who and how much...

mindslight 10y ago
Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this. The advantage of FOSS is that the set of who can audit the code is open. It starts small, but grows with popularity and remains agile - eg doesn't necessitate transitively trusting whatever nation-states a single company is vulnerable to.
- raesene9 10y ago
  Unfortunately can audit and do audit are very different things. I'd agree absolutely FOSS has a higher possible level of trust than a proprietary solution, however in practice I don't think it's necessarily the case. To take one example with a propietary solution with code from a single company, it is possible for a level of background checking to be done on all contributors. With a FOSS solution, that's just not possible, so you get risks like what if one of the contributors is being paid by a nation state who would like to place a specific bug/vulnerability into a codebase. Of course in practice the world is much muddier than that as pretty much all propietary software vendors make ample use of code they did not write, and in many cases on open source code that they don't really controle the provenance of. Personally I'd say the idea of having a high level of trust in any larg'ish software stack is very dubious these days given the likely incentives of various groups to compromise them.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  "Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this." The first systems that were trustworthy were done by proprietary companies with independent evaluation of the product, signatures on source/binaries, and/or optional generation from source on-site. This became standard practice in security- and safety-critical development. You can scale it to as many people available for review often under NDA for the source itself but not signatures or binaries.
  - mindslight 10y ago
    Sure the company can improve their process, but you're trusting the company to do that and do it properly - a user's relationship is still effectively rooted with one company. It's generous to call this "high", but forgive me for trying to make the point palatable to people who believe an autocratic company makes for something trustable. A company can do things that are similar to Free software (eg allow customers to build from source), but in the context of modern discussion I'd say that's just taking on aspects of Free software.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Im responding to this claim: "Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this." It's totally false. The evaluation side has been done more times than I can count. It doesn't even have to start with a single source. Many products started as a collaboration of multiple organizations checking each others work that share the result. Another model is CompSci inventing something with details open at the start, patented, and then turned into closed source product. Finally, there's Shared Source models where you can have, fix, or extend the source so long as you're paying. Burroughs B5000 (1961), first system resilient to 0-days, was distributed in source form to customers. You were oversimplifying proprietary systems then attacking that simplification.
      - mindslight 10y ago
        I appreciate your historic perspectives, but it feels like we're merely quibbling over terms/framework on this one. I don't think I'm oversimplifying, more like it's current mass-oriented software that essentially falls into two basic camps, Free and proprietary, with various small tweaks to each model. For example, something like a mass-NDA for every user is going to fail for consumer-oriented software, whereas a company contracting a discrete number of external auditing decomposes into trust through branding. I'd love to find a commercial model that could work for consumer-oriented Free software [0], and I think it could sound quite similar to something you describe. It's just that those type of multi-party collaborations have been pulled into the attractor of free-as-in-beer, at least as far as the code itself is concerned. [0] I say Free instead of Open, because I can envision software lacking just FSF freedoms 1b and 3 could get stuck in a bad state as well. Like say everyone knows there is a bug and how to fix it, but is legally prevented from doing so.
pawadu 10y ago
> I'm not aware of any mainstream OS that has been fully reviewed for security Windows NT OpenBSD
- raesene9 10y ago
  Fully audited? all the code? you sure? If so, I'd be very interested to see links to the results.

mindslight 10y ago

Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this. The advantage of FOSS is that the set of who can audit the code is open. It starts small, but grows with popularity and remains agile - eg doesn't necessitate transitively trusting whatever nation-states a single company is vulnerable to.

raesene9 10y ago
Unfortunately can audit and do audit are very different things. I'd agree absolutely FOSS has a higher possible level of trust than a proprietary solution, however in practice I don't think it's necessarily the case. To take one example with a propietary solution with code from a single company, it is possible for a level of background checking to be done on all contributors. With a FOSS solution, that's just not possible, so you get risks like what if one of the contributors is being paid by a nation state who would like to place a specific bug/vulnerability into a codebase. Of course in practice the world is much muddier than that as pretty much all propietary software vendors make ample use of code they did not write, and in many cases on open source code that they don't really controle the provenance of. Personally I'd say the idea of having a high level of trust in any larg'ish software stack is very dubious these days given the likely incentives of various groups to compromise them.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this." The first systems that were trustworthy were done by proprietary companies with independent evaluation of the product, signatures on source/binaries, and/or optional generation from source on-site. This became standard practice in security- and safety-critical development. You can scale it to as many people available for review often under NDA for the source itself but not signatures or binaries.
- mindslight 10y ago
  Sure the company can improve their process, but you're trusting the company to do that and do it properly - a user's relationship is still effectively rooted with one company. It's generous to call this "high", but forgive me for trying to make the point palatable to people who believe an autocratic company makes for something trustable. A company can do things that are similar to Free software (eg allow customers to build from source), but in the context of modern discussion I'd say that's just taking on aspects of Free software.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Im responding to this claim: "Proprietary software starts off with a high level of trust - trusting just one company. But it can never progress past this." It's totally false. The evaluation side has been done more times than I can count. It doesn't even have to start with a single source. Many products started as a collaboration of multiple organizations checking each others work that share the result. Another model is CompSci inventing something with details open at the start, patented, and then turned into closed source product. Finally, there's Shared Source models where you can have, fix, or extend the source so long as you're paying. Burroughs B5000 (1961), first system resilient to 0-days, was distributed in source form to customers. You were oversimplifying proprietary systems then attacking that simplification.
    - mindslight 10y ago
      I appreciate your historic perspectives, but it feels like we're merely quibbling over terms/framework on this one. I don't think I'm oversimplifying, more like it's current mass-oriented software that essentially falls into two basic camps, Free and proprietary, with various small tweaks to each model. For example, something like a mass-NDA for every user is going to fail for consumer-oriented software, whereas a company contracting a discrete number of external auditing decomposes into trust through branding. I'd love to find a commercial model that could work for consumer-oriented Free software [0], and I think it could sound quite similar to something you describe. It's just that those type of multi-party collaborations have been pulled into the attractor of free-as-in-beer, at least as far as the code itself is concerned. [0] I say Free instead of Open, because I can envision software lacking just FSF freedoms 1b and 3 could get stuck in a bad state as well. Like say everyone knows there is a bug and how to fix it, but is legally prevented from doing so.

pawadu 10y ago

> I'm not aware of any mainstream OS that has been fully reviewed for security Windows NT OpenBSD

raesene9 10y ago
Fully audited? all the code? you sure? If so, I'd be very interested to see links to the results.