How Secure Is Linux?

Linux Security ^ | 8 March 2021 | Brittany Day

[jz638]

Computer security is a lot more than user permissions and packet traffic. If a sufficiently committed attacker wants to get in to or damage your system though, he’s gonna get in or damage it. If you are a defender, all you can do is make it cost more money and time to do so than the attacker thinks is worthwhile, or create a method of reducing the effects of damage.

I agree that *nix architecture has apples to apples advantages over Microsoft. I think open architecture is a design philosophy that results in more secure systems, and that cost to attack the system is naturally higher for linux than it would be for microsoft.

Of course, once governments around the world start putting quantum computing to work in a way that can crack AES and SHA (and while I do expect that it will happen in my lifetime, I don’t expect there will be a formal announcement, people will just notice things happening that could only be explained by this advance), a lot of what we thought we knew about computer security is going to be thrown out the window.

[linMcHlp]

In order of Least Secure to Most Secure:

1. Android
2. Windows
3. Apple (iOS)
4. Linux (Desktop/Server
5. Apple OS

Seems to be the present situation.

[DUMBGRUNT]

—”Useful for things other than the most simple of desktop tasks, no.”

I have installed mostly Ubuntu for many, many friends, family, neighbors...

And it works well for them, because of the many cloud-based applications.

Not 100%, my wife worked for a gov agency that required the latest version of MS Edge to log in to work.

Dual boot is very simple to implement and use...

Outside of work, most spend their time in a browser.

[zeugma]

Yep... Plain and simple. And the system remains isolated. The concept makes too much sense. System-Swap-Home, all separate partition volumes.

Backups are important as well. Let's say someone did sneak something by me. Because it was executing as my user, it could totally trash all my files. This would not be trivial, as I have a crapload of data, mostly music, and personal files/pics and docs.

However, if something like that happened, I'd boot from media, reinstall everything, and restore from last night's backup. I might lose a day's worth of browsing history, but that gets wiped regularly anyway, so who cares?

One thing I'd really love to implement as a part of my backup routine would be to automount the backup drive as the backup starts, then unmount as it ends.

[minnesota_bound]

No writer for Linux or any other tech nerd stuff looks as good as the Brittany Day in your post!
So it must be someone else : )

[ducttape45]

Norton, Comodo, AVG

[ShadowAce]

If you need an antivirus, clam AV would be the way to go. It comes in the standard software repository, and you just have to install it.

[Openurmind]

I do similar... I have “Timeshift” auto take a restore point image every couple days, and manually before I make any changes or installs. It will also throw up a list of what you actually want to restore back as previous. :)

[zeugma]

I was working on something the other day and couldn’t make it work. I wanted the external drive to mount, then run the backup, then unmount. I couldn’t get it to work. The backintime program seems to want to run outside the thread, so the script would mount, fire up backintime, then immediately unmount. It was annoying. I suppose I might be able to have the script check once a minute or so if backintime was running and only unmount if not. I apparently need to think about it a bit more.

[ShadowAce]

I’m not familiar with backintime, but my backup solution uses rsync, which does run inside the thread. My script mounts the drive, rsyncs to it, and then umounts it. Works perfectly every time.

[ShadowAce]

The backintime program seems to want to run outside the thread...

OK, you'll have to include some logic in your script.

Launch backintime, find the PID (ps-aux| grep), perform a while loop to wait until the PID is done, then perform the unmount.

That should accomplish it.

[Openurmind]

Something I have always found a bit confusing is how Linux apps want to mount and unmount partitions, volumes, and drives like that.

Something I realized when installing a Mint one time is that sometimes after an action like that is chosen it needs to unmount the volume to make those wanted changes to it. What gave me a hint was during the install it required the internal drive to be unmounted before it could do it’s auto partition changes to it from the external ISO test drive/install USB stick.

I am still trying to figure out exactly when and why it wants to unmount different things like that depending on what you are trying to do. It seems random depending on the action wanted. But it always seems to work when I just trust it.

I am going to guess “backintime” is the same as the “timeshift” I use that comes boxed by default with this Mint. If so I found there are some configuration settings in the app that can be customized to make it do what you want it to do aside from the default configs.

I don’t know if that helps any but something that might be worth trying is disabling the backintime and download/install timeshift and see if it works better for your needs? It might have better configuration options?

I do know the “restore” snapshot apps like that work different than the actual “backup” apps work. So maybe an actual backup tool app with good config options might work better for what you are trying to do there?

[zeugma]

That’s pretty much what I was thinking. There is an issue though that I’m going to have to work around. It appears that the first time backintime is invoked after boot, a ‘service’ binary stays loaded “/usr/share/backintime/qt/serviceHelper.py”. That means just grepping for ‘backintime’ will always be true.

I’m looking through the backintime docs now to see if I can figure out how to invoke the mount/unmount as a part of the config.

[zeugma]

Well, one you might need to unmount a device is because you need to do something low-level to it, like repartitioning, or formatting with a filesystem. When you format a device, it has to be unmounted because otherwise you could get corruption if some process wanted to write to the device while you were formatting it. Obviously, you'd never want to just unplug a drive that was mounted, because it could be in the middle of a write operation, and you could leave the device in an inconsistent state, which is never a good thing. I much prefer the way that Unix/Linux treats drives much better than the Windoze way. Because in Linux everything is a file, it allows you to do some stuff that you couldn't do in Windoze. I also think it makes much more sense to have everything cascade from / rather than drive letters, though for new users it can take some getting used to.

Regarding timeshift, I'd look at changing, but I have been literally using backintime for years. I have backups on my main backup device that go back to 2016, and older than that with my offsite archives. (I keep quarterly backups in my safe deposit box).

Not having used timeshift, I can't really say much about ease of use, but I really like the way backintime lets me deal with those offsite backups. What I do for that, is the evening that I want to take a backup for that, I unmount /backup, then plug in the offsite drive and mount it on /backup. Then I go to bed. The cronjob that runs nightly takes care of the actual backup for me. In the morning, I unmount /backup, and remount the default drive. The offsite drive goes to the bank, and I bring back the previous offsite. That is sweet IMO.

Reading through the backintime docs, it looks like there should be a way to do a mount/umount thing, but it's probably going to require a hand-edit of the config, as the gui doesn't seem to mention those options. (sigh).

[Poser]

If only I could get a WiFi driver that works with Debian on my Dell Inspiron 6400!

[ShadowAce]

What's your wifi chipset? Broadcom? Is it a Cingular card?

Can you post the output of lspci ?

[Poser]

Whatever is in a Dell Inspiron 6400

[Openurmind]

Thank you for sharing that. Hope Ace was able to help you.