Comment on Do any hardened Linux distributions exist?
ctr1@fl0w.cc 1 year ago
I would look into Gentoo’s Hardened + SELinux profile if you want good security in a standard system, but as others have mentioned QubesOS is probably the most secure option OOTB (but it is very limiting). SELinux is pretty difficult to use but it’s really effective, and there is good information about it on the Gentoo wiki. Not sure what exactly goes into their hardened profile but I know it implements at least some of the suggestions listed on that site (like hardened compilation flags). Also it’s probably more vulnerable to 0-day attacks than Qubes, since it uses up-to-date software. But it’s really flexible, and learning SELinux is useful
ruination@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
You can even mix and match it H/SELinux with musl (and Clang, if you’re up for some masochism and performance boost), though it does require patching sometimes. From my experience, you can find patches from Alpine’s Aports and that should fix it ~90% of the time, but sometimes you’d need to write your own. Another tip in case you’re interested in trying musl on Gentoo is that there’s a compilation flag for large file support documented in Gentoo Wiki’s musl development page which fixes compilation failures caused by calls to functions with names ending in 64 (e.g. fseek64). This is yet another massive source of compilation failure in musl. Lastly, you should mask musl versions greater than 1.2.4 if you want to have any semblance of a good time with it.
ctr1@fl0w.cc 1 year ago
Oh good to know! Thanks for the tips. What do you like about musl it over glibc?
ruination@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
To be honest, I only use it for fun. Unless you enjoy tinkering like I do, or you have really low RAM, there’s no reason to use it over glibc. I’m aware that Madaidan also mentioned that it is more secure, but I’m not too knowledgeable on that so I can’t really comment.
ctr1@fl0w.cc 1 year ago
Ah gotcha, just asking because I’ve never used it before. Good to know that Gentoo supports hardening it