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.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 20th, 2024

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  • Anything really. Just use Docker/Podman or LXC and then the base OS won’t matter.

    • Ubuntu is still fine
    • Debian I have personally used and it is good
    • I used openSUSE Slowroll for a while as well
    • Fedora server is just as good as RHEL derivatives IMO

    Next thing I am looking at is secureblue for Fedora CoreOS. Security matters and a rock solid base with hardened defaults is really nice. It also is Atomic and because it is effectively just CoreOS, you install it with a JSON file (I think). Using the provided example butane file it took like 30 seconds to install. Now I need to customize it further.





  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoOpen Source@lemmy.ml/e/OS is not a secure OS
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    2 days ago

    I still dont understand /e/OS. Just use LineageOS. It supports all the same devices and doesnt lag as far behind. You can choose to run an insecure OS if you like (see: all Windows 10 users) but definitely don’t recommend it to others.

    You cannot have privacy without at least basic security. Targeted attacks are not the most common kind of attack by long shot. Threat actors scan for vulnerable devices and use automated scripts to execute attacks. Android is one of the most exploited targets. With an outdated OS your browser could be exploited and used to get a sandbox escape, possibly chaining it into root escalation. It all depends on the vulnerabilities found and the longer you wait the more likely for the “stars to align” for the perfect attack. Look at CVE-2025-48593 for an example, zero-click RCE. In recent memory there was also a zero-click RCE utilizing specially crafted MMS, meaning an threat actor could send messages to all phone numbers and try the attack in mass.

    /e/OS is by far the most behind on updating security patch levels of the AOSP ROMs (at ~2 months), iode is ~1 and everything else is better than those two.

    Privacy without security is not real privacy, it is a mirage.

    Security without privacy is like a fortress with cameras inside, a known threat (eg. Gapps Android).

    Privacy with security is like a fortess with no known threats at all (eg. AOSP with timely security patches).

    Privacy without security is like a fortress where some of the locks have rusted through and if someone tries they can open the doors. It is like replacing the walls with cardboard. “No one can spy on me now” you say in your cardboard castle.









  • Yes, I understand what GVisor does. Cgroups2 are for isolation of system resources, bit arent even the main sandbox feature used for isolation by Docker. I am pretty sure namespaces significantly more important for these containers’ security.

    GVisor helps with one of the main risks in a container setup which is the shared kernel by hosts and guests. I understand it comes with a performance penalty (and I didnt know it was incompatible with SELinux), but that does change my original point that GVisor is a security improvement to default Docker. I understand there is more nuance, even when I wrote my original comment I understood (just like any other security feature) it cant be used in every scenario. I was being intentionally general, and in my second comment I was pretty specific about what it protects against: Kernel vulnerabilities and privilege escalation.

    I researched cgroups2 more and I still dont understand why you brought it up in the first place. Cgroups2 and gvisor provide very different security benefits. Cgroups help to keep a system available (lessening the risk DoS attacks) by controlling access to some system resources (io, devices, cpu, memory) and grouping processes of a similar type. It seems rather optimized to solve resource control on a container host. I mentioned gvisor because it is mostly just a drop-in replacement container runtime which doesnt need setup to be used.s

    Now for a different container runtime which provides significantly more features (than gvisor) with less downsides (if configured correctly for a specific workload), Sydbox provides syd-oci which id an application kernel runtime which uses a permission config file to create a sandbox, isolating using namespaces, seccomp, landlock, and more. It can sandbox in many different categories (often times leveraging multiple features to provide a multilayer sandbox), you can see the categories at the syd manpage. The biggest downside is that you must really understand what your container application needs otherwise it will prevent it from running. It is a “secure by-default” sandbox which can be softened through config.


  • I dont really understand what you mean in your last sentence.

    My reason for saying GVisor is safer is because it is an application kernel which provides traps and emulates most Linux syscalls in the guest with a far smaller set of syscalls to the host kernel, helping to prevent container escapes and privilege escalation. GVisor also fully drops privileges early into start up (before running any significant logic), helping to prevent privilege escalation.

    Cgroups is not a really a security feature (from what I understand). It is about controlling process priority, hierarchy, and resources limiting (among other things). You can not use GVisor with LXC.