Re: Debians security features in comparison to Ubuntu
Joel Rees:
>> He told me to use Ubuntu instead. He explained that with the fact,
>> that Ubuntu has more security features enabled than Debian (also
>> more compiler flags for security) in a fresh install. He gave me a
>> link to the following site:
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features
>>
>
> That's a good list of all the currently fashionable "security"
> features for Linux. Some of the items in the list are meaningful,
> some are not. Most might be if you know what you are doing with them.
> None of the meaningful items in that list are unavailable on Debian,
> and the defaults are reasonably secure in Debian.
The problem is, that Debian lacks a page similar to:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features
As you can see, that https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features page
looks impressive to new users. I guess Debian is losing a few users to
Ubuntu, because Debian does not have such a page.
> This will be an issue with any OS you
> choose, even seriously secure OSses like openBSD.
Is OpenBSD a seriously secure OS?
Last time I checked, OpenBSD didn't provide signed packages for the
package manager by default. Using OpenBSD signed packages for updating
only seemed ridiculously complicated.
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html:
"OpenBSD is thought of by many security professionals as the most secure
UNIX-like operating system"
Well, for experts eventually, not for normal users! And I am wondering
which security professionals they are quoting and from when these quotes
are.
> Do not surf the web as root or as any administrator login id, of
> course.
>
> Speaking of admin login ids, it's a good idea to have one non-root
> login id that you only use for administrative tasks. And you should
> avoid getting onto the web when logged in with the admin id. Which
> means you need another id for general use, which makes two strong
> passwords, three if you allow root login.
After reading the following blog post
http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.fr/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html
it seems to me, that user account level isolation isn't very strong.
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