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I thought that Linux is secure against viruses, because it has a sane security model, unlike Windows which is insecure no matter what.
by 21 8y ago
I thought that Linux is secure against viruses, because it has a sane security model, unlike Windows which is insecure no matter what.
- ayr-ton 8y agoAll software is vulnerable to a lot of kind of attacks, especially when outdated.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoLinux, the kernel, and NT, the kernel, are mostly secure. People manage to build insecure things on top of each.
- xorcist 8y agoWell, that's perhaps reductionist a bit too far to be a useful statement. There are other things outside the kernel that are important too, and design decisions that matter to user space. Things like OLE can be said in retrospect wasn't a good idea security wise. Autorun kept delivering for more than a decade. Perhaps GDI could do with a security model. That sort of things makes it unnecessarily difficult to secure the system. The reason we don't hear about Windows router botnets is because nobody bothers building those boxes in the first place. You put your Windows box behind a small Linux box in order to connect it to the Internet, not the other way around.
- ectospheno 8y agoQuite a few are placed behind small BSD boxes rather than Linux. But yeah, internet facing Windows routers aren't exactly common. Certainly not without spending a good bit of time in group policy editor turning off almost everything.
- jahewson 8y agoYep though there’s problems on the *nix side too, e.g. X11 does not have a great security model. But it’s also unlikely to be running on a router.
- rbanffy 8y agoBoth are probably perfectly secure, as long as you disable the FPU, speculative execution, SMT... Processors themselves are insecure. There is no hope this war can be won.
- jahewson 8y agoThe short answer is that Windows has had a “sane” security model since Vista.
- hyperman1 8y agoThe better answer is the enemy has changed. In the past, security focused on multiple users of the same machine. Users should be safeguarded from each other. Applications are installed system wide by a knowledgeable sysadmin and can be trusted. But this threat model was completely dated. Today, most machines have 1 user. But the applications are either cheaply written with no respect for other applications, or are actively harming the user by stealing his data, and the average user is his own sysadmin but really doesn't want to do the job or knows how. Additionally, DRM means the machine tries to defend itself from its owner, preferring multinationals instead. The windows XP and standard unix security model defend against the old threat model. Android, iPhone and Vista + defend against the new model.