N.E.P.T.R
I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.
Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.
TL;DR I am a nerd.
- 1 Post
- 213 Comments
Maybe a MacBook M3 or 4 with the hopes that asahi gets support in the future? More RAM means much more money. I suggested a MacBook because OP like Mac.
For Mac, go with a Mac Book Neo.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com•We gotta teach history moreEnglish
103·9 days agoNot what I said. I just gave a source for what OP was most likely saying, which is “the modern police got its origins in capturing escaped enslaved people”
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Devuan + I3(Picom) or Void Linux + Niri (DMS)English
6·10 days agoNo, but Sway is basically a drop in replacement.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@lemmy.ml•What reasons do people have for disliking SELinux?English
8·25 days agoPlain and simple, with a supply chain attack.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•How would you expose Jellyfin securely without a vpn?English
6·30 days agoRemote code execution is a concern. Your server and your network as a whole (including other VLANs) are susceptible to attack if Jellyfin is compromised. If Jellyfin is running on the host, it would be trivial to hack your server (and anything else running/connected to it). If Jellyfin is in a Docker/Podman containers, it doesnt prevent attacks against the host (sandbox escape, kernel privilege escalation, etc), or against your network over some ports. Even if the server is on it’s own VLAN, a vulnerability or weakness in your router could still lead to a compromise, meaning that any devices that is in any way connected to your router (including personal devices) could be attacked.
There is a lot of depth to this topic of course. And at some point you just calculate your risks and weigh your options. There is no such thing as perfect security of course.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Systemd v261-rc1 is out with the 'birth date field'English
2·1 month agoIt doesn’t use systemd, nor do they seem to have plans to add age attestation.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Selfhosted@lemmy.world•Chhoto URL v7 is out now: A simple, blazingly fast, selfhosted URL shortener with no unnecessary features; written in Rust.English
3·1 month agoCan you elaborate? Seems interesting.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•I built a 90.7kb tool that bypasses Windows screen capture protection. Should I open source it?English
55·2 months agoYou you do choose to release it, do it on codeberg because GitHub is Microsoft owned and has an incentive to remove it.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@programming.dev•[Solved] Question about flatpak-related user foldersEnglish
11·2 months agoOn the first laptop the missing folders are likely to do with the fact that the Flatpaks are installed as system Flatpaks, therefore installed under /var/lib/flatpak (iirc). Flatpak is configured to let you install them as system wide Flatpak apps, meaning other users on your computer will also see them. It would normally require authentication to do that, but many distros configure it to be easy by default.
The second laptop is installing them as user Flatpaks, meaning the folders (mostly shared libraries, desktop entries, and apps) are stored in the user’s home folder.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@lemmy.ml•Linux is actually very vulnerable to exploits and it's showing with high value vulnerabilities that has been dropping in the latest years; FreeBSD is way better in security recordEnglish
51·2 months agoWhat does it mean to “make Linux secure”? What does secure mean to you (genuine question). I see people say they can make Linux secure but from what kinds of attacks. I think madaidan’s blog explains why you can’t as an individual fix an issue with the entire ecosystem, or fix the kernel of its inherent security flaws https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
I think “good security” in my personal opinion means that even if you try to run a malicious app, it either crashes out right or can’t do anything because it doesn’t have the permission to.
One thing that I think is very misunderstood is that messy or extremely large/dense code can be very hard to understand, even if you have the source code. Like systemd, it is several million lines of code and is very tangled together. Is it that much better than a blackbox if no one can audit the whole thing (unless you are a massive team)? I do think it is better to have source code and documentation, but vulnerabilities arise from unintended interactions in the code. The more code there is, the higher the chance of this happening.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@programming.dev•Linux is actually very vulnerable to exploits and it's showing with high value vulnerabilities that has been dropping in the latest years; FreeBSD is way better in security recordEnglish
72·2 months agoJust because AOSP uses many of the Linux kernels security features doesn’t magically make other distros more secure. Same with servers vs desktop, which have far different usage requirements and patterns, and vastly different threat models.
Linux desktop is a decade or more behind the curve on exploit mitigations and harm reduction. Social engineering is still a security failure, and it almost as much the fault of OS developers that people are falling for these attacks.
Only recently has sandboxing become more popular for distributing applications, but it still isn’t even close to as secure to AOSP or IOS/MacOS sandboxes. Flatpak and Snap are inherently insecure and that isn’t even their fault because they aren’t really meant to be secure sandboxes; they exist for easy system agnostic app distribution.
Many users still use X11 (or xwayland) which is consistently the source of vulns and regardless is massively insecure. X11 is a nasty rats nest of code and hacks which is massive, complex, and often runs privileged. Ever X11 app has complete access to the X server, and can: record the screen, read all window events and positions, record all keystrokes, send keyboard and mouse events, and much more. Wayland is a good step in the right direction. But Wayland compositors can also suffer from easy attacks, like using LD_PRELOAD to record keystrokes.
Speaking of LD_PRELOAD, most users have .bashrc writeable in there home. Any app that has write access to their home directory can preload a malicious binary which can modify and exploit the running app.
With .bashrc writeable, a hacker can just change tbe user’s $PATH and create a fake sudo binary which records the user’s password, and escalates to root without them knowing. Even specifying the full path isn’t safe, because a hacker can just set an alias which takes priority of the actual path of the binary (eg. /usr/bin/sudo could be an alias of /tmp/sudo).
Now I hear you saying, why didn’t the user just NOT run the malicious script or app? With supply chain attacks being at all time highs, you can’t just rely on trusting your application developer. An app could get compromised and you wouldn’t know. Even if you verify signatures, OpenPGP and GNUPG are inherently broken (see: gpg.fail, Latacora blog, Mathew Green blog)
Most distros use extremely weak memory allocators which allow for easy exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities. Hardened_malloc by GrapheneOS works on desktop Linux, with most apps just working fine out of the box. It helps to eliminate (or severely increase the complexity of) memory corruption vulnerabilities.
Many distros don’t use mandatory access control policies like AppArmor or SELinux (eg. Arch Linux and its derivatives), and even if they do it isn’t compare able to AOSP, like Fedora which use SELinux but doesnt by default isolate all applications with strong policies.
Then there are LTS distros, which because of their release schedule and also the way that CVEs are assigned, often miss important patches which go unnoticed (or not triaged for their security impact). See the recent copy.fail vuln which because of its disclosure timeline wasn’t given ahead of time to distros. The only ones affected were slower moving distros, where as rolling release distros were fine (eg Arch Linux).
Of course let’s not forget SETUID and SETGID which are the source of many many privilege escalation attacks, like in the case of that AppArmor vuln about a month ago. Daemon based privilege elevation tools (such as s6-sudo) avoid this problem, but they are not widespread. Systemd’s run0 is a more popular example, but just like everything with systemd it is a massive attack surface and extremely complex under-the-hood.
Linux has many security modules (LSMs) such as MAC (eg. SELinux), Seccomp (for filtering syscalls), Landlock (for filesystem and network isolation), unprivileged user namespaces, etc. The only popular apps which make use of some of these features are browsers.
Of course drivers are another source of vulnerabilities because the are implemented in kernelspace instead of using a standardized ABI.
Linux is not a secure desktop OS. Neither is it very secure for a server OS (without extensive development of tools which properly use the kernels security features).
I could apply most of what I have said to the *BSDs within the context of Desktop OSes.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@programming.dev•Linux is actually very vulnerable to exploits and it's showing with high value vulnerabilities that has been dropping in the latest years; FreeBSD is way better in security recordEnglish
61·2 months agoI agree with most of your points. But the *BSDs are not somehow more secure as a desktop OS. The suffer the same fundamental flaw which are present on Linux: no sane/coherent threat model. Desktop apps run unsandboxed without any MAC policies. The *BSDs also lack many of the useful security features available on Linux (not that most Linux distros do anything with that stuff either, except AOSP and ChromeOS). Just cus a kernel is more “secure” does mean anything when the stuff implemented in userspace doesn’t make use of any of those features.
SELinux is very powerful, same with Seccomp and Landlock. But do any distros make extensive use of that and actually also sandbox applications.
FreeBSD has capsicum (and also an implementation of FLASK?, which is what SELinux is for Linux). OpenBSD has pledge. But are apps required to run in a isolated environment? Many of the *BSDs (and certainly .most of their users) still use X11 instead of modern alternatives like Wayland. The are still monolithic kernels which dont implement drivers in userspace, network, etc in userspace. Not secure at all.
MacOS is more secure, I agree. But it isn’t trying nearly hard enough IMO.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@programming.dev•Linux is actually very vulnerable to exploits and it's showing with high value vulnerabilities that has been dropping in the latest years; FreeBSD is way better in security recordEnglish
65·2 months agoFreeBSD has cleaner code and a far simpler kernel. More eyes on the code doesn’t make the code quality magically better, and vis versa. Linux has many security features not present in the *BSDs, but it also has a massive attack surface and has been historically hostile to security features (see: grsecurity isn’t upstreamed because it was rejected by the kernel maintainers).
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@programming.dev•Linux is actually very vulnerable to exploits and it's showing with high value vulnerabilities that has been dropping in the latest years; FreeBSD is way better in security recordEnglish
4·2 months agoFlatpaks are not a secure sandbox. The sandbox exists to distribute apps, and the security is secondary. Apps are very minimally sandboxed. A better permission system would severely weaken the sandbox with basic permissions needed by so many apps. The amount of apps on Flathub that I have seen which need access to org.freedesktop.Flatpak which removes the sandbox. Browsers have their own sandbox crippled because Flatpak blocks namespace access, but that is not a problem for Snaps. Flatpak does not implement many (or any) modern exploit mitigations. Apps that have audio permission have microphone access, and access to all desktop audio. X11 access doesnt use something like Xephyr for a separate X11 to prevent apps from escaping the sandbox, especially on a X11 desktop environment. Etc, etc.
Now dont take me for a Snap shill. I don’t think that is very good either. But at least its permission system is more thorough and apps tend to work better in a lot of cases. It also has on-screen permission requests (at least I think). It still suffers from many of the same problems as Flatpak.
I still use Flatpaks though. Just wish things were better.
N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneto
Linux@programming.dev•Anti-cheat incompatibility on Linux is unacceptable from game developers and publishers — and Rocket League just proved whyEnglish
98·2 months agoIn school we had a talk from a guest speaker who professionally developed malware. He said kernel-level anticheat was indistinguishable from malware. He said the same thing about (3rd-party) antivirus.
Pretty sure Asahi fixed that problem already.