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> You can have secure monolith and insecure microkernel. Superficially, that claim sounds reasonable, but I'd have a hard time substantiating it. There is exac
by saithound 3y ago
> You can have secure monolith and insecure microkernel.
Superficially, that claim sounds reasonable, but I'd have a hard time substantiating it. There is exactly one secure microkernel ready for production use today, and zero secure monolithic kernels. There's not even a "here's how one could secure a monolithic kernel in principle" whitepaper.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> There is exactly one secure microkernel ready for production use today, and zero secure monolithic kernels. I'd be interested to hear your definition of "secure", and why OpenBSD doesn't qualify.
- astrange 3y agoOpenBSD mostly operates on a hobbyist's idea of security, where they just make up attacks to defend against rather than being systematic or actually keeping up with the outside world. (https://isopenbsdsecu.re https://isopenbsdsecu.re) Although professional security people are also rather bad at this and like to eg stack multiple cool-looking mitigations even if they break each other. (https://siguza.github.io/PAN/ https://siguza.github.io/PAN/)
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoOkay, so what threat model successfully attacks an OpenBSD box and fails on... I assume the one "secure" microkernel is seL4? Since OpenBSD only defends against made up attacks, this should of course be very easy to demonstrate.
- astrange 3y agoIt's not "an OpenBSD box" but "an OpenBSD box running a typical amount of third party services".