Madaidan's Insecurities

For some excellent advice on security and privacy based on thoroughly researched technical concerns rather than speculation or blind trust in any particular organization (e.g. Apple or Google or Mozilla), see here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/ I found the Android and Firefox/Chromium evaluations particularly interesting.

They make detailed arguments for their position, for example, https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/ The people who think that Linux security is fine also make arguments, but those arguments are much less detailed (and much less convincing IMHO), such as the frequently-made argument that the fact that Linux's source code is readily available at no cost to anyone who wants to search it for security holes means that Linux's security will tend to be better than the security of systems whose source code is held secret. I mean, sure, if that were the only thing we knew about operating systems and we were forced to choose an OS based on that single piece of information, we'd choose one of the open-source ones, but the persuasiveness of that argument is more than cancelled out when we consider all the other things we know, such as the fact that many exploitable vulnerabilities have been found in Linux that examination of old versions of the source code reveal have been present for decades. >How about the opinion of people who have nothing to win nor lose? The question is complicated enough that my guess is that basically the only people who make the mental effort to resolve the question are people with a stake in it. How many people for example who do not have a loved one with the cancer or a unusually high risk for that cancer and who do not hope to advance their careers as cancer-curers or cancer-preventers take the trouble to learn about the diagnosis and treatment of a…

It's at best a mixed bag which makes it harder to fine-tune apps on your system and with limited security benefits (which again become harder to improve yourself). https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html#flatpak

There's a great Linux hardening guide that really made me question the common refrain about linux being more secure. Out of the box on many distros it's not particularly that safe, it's widespread usage in servers rather than desktops means it's more the sensible firewalling and lack of user installed apps that's giving it the appearance of security. Edit: the guide, first link is their rationale - https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html

Unfortunately, Firefox‘s security on Android is .. not the best (https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html#android…

This is greatly related to the lack of per-tab sandboxing in Firefox (https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html) it's not only a security issue but a performance issue as well.

This is only a part of a browser engine. Security? Website isolation? Performance? And many other things are just simply better in chromium. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html Yes Google is abusing its influence on chromium, but one must admit, its simply the best engine out there.

I love obsd and agree with all your points...except security. A Whonix developer and GrapheneOS contributor wrote this up better than I can: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/openbsd.html

I thought this was important to post here, given the amount of people that claim to have switched to Linux Phones after Apple's CSAM debacle. The author recommends using mainstream iOS/Android or GrapheneOS on Pixel Phones. Here's his overview of Android security: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html I also slightly editorialized the title, since it is extremely non-descriptive of article contents.

My principles are not worth actively sacrificing my security. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

I actually have seen this in my current company. Many developers switched browsers away from Firefox. Some even switched to Edge since it plays better with the battery. I know early adopters of Brave from its early years too. When things get a bit bigger in JIRA, Firefox's JS engine struggles with horrifying amount of JS JIRA throws at it. Same for Google Meet and Zoom. I tried and realized Firefox has a huge power consumption penalty on my Android phones and a considerable one on my laptop. I still keep it as a secondary but it is still not there yet. IT people in my both current and previous company prefer deploying Google Chrome. Previous one was a complete Microsoft shop, they didn't use the built-in Edge but removed it and deployed Chrome. There is quite a bit Microsoft sysadmin know-how about Chrome, less for Edge and even less so for Firefox. If you're privacy-conscious you'd have searched or visited blogs like this[1] or privacyguides.org or privacytools.io. They all point out issues. They are all a factor. Many people still install Chrome because the apps / websites they visit tell them so. If you used web-based engineering software, they will always recommend Chrome. Google Docs of course works better on Chrome, intentionally or unintentionally Google will roll out more optimizations for it. [1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

Rooting is a very bad idea. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html#rooting But GrapheneOS is fully open source and provides great build instructions, so you can always make your own build and add whatever features or privileged apps you like within the standard AOSP frameworks for privileged apps with system integration. > Backing up all app data via Neo Backup GrapheneOS includes Seedvault by default. https://grapheneos.org/features#encrypted-backups > High-quality call recording via Call Recorder Call recording is built into the Dialer app on GrapheneOS. https://grapheneos.org/features#encrypted-backups:~:text=Call%20record… > DNS-based ad blocking is possible via apps like AdGuard DNS-based blocking can also be accomplished by using Android's native Private DNS feature with a resolver that blocks ads. You could even host your own on a VPS if you are more comfortable running name resolution and DNS-level adblocking on infrastructure you control. The RethinkDNS app also lets you use DNS-level adblocking and a VPN at the same time. https://grapheneos.org/faq#ad-blocking-apps > I have no experience with…

Yeah. With OpenRC or runit, the idea is you just layer the security on yourself since the base is so minimal. Honestly, the best place to start for any system is Madaidan’s Linux Hardening Guide. It’s super thorough and works for pretty much anything. From there, you can add other tools. The Gentoo Hardened setup with SELinux is an option, but it’s a ton of work. AppArmor is way easier for just locking down specific services and apps, it’s what Alpine uses and it’s pretty effective. And for sandboxing random apps, Firejail is perfect. You can just wrap it around your browser or anything else you don’t fully trust to keep it contained. Gives you a lot of control. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-gentoo-linux-void-linux-and-al… https://github.com/gentoo/hardened-refpolicy https://krython.com/post/hardening-alpine-linux-system-security/

All the features that Google ships are necessary for web apps. E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/ — Note that Firefox was once on top of this development, during the days when they also had an interest in developing FirefoxOS. Those days are long gone. As for what Google has done historically with Chrome, it's trivially easy to point to developments that have improved the web. You can start with the fact that it's the most secure browser, see for instance: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html You can also read their original marketing material, in which they describe the isolation of plugins, extensions, or tabs, i.e., a crashing Flash movie or a crashing website no longer crashed the browser — then count the years it took for their competition to catch up: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/ On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser. It always was, with V8 being the fastest JS engine since launch, but also in benchmarks testing more “real” experiences, like Speedometer 3. The only area where it needs improvement is battery efficiency on macOS machines, where Safari has the lead, but even there it made great strides. Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop. For mobile devices, the first one was Apple's Safari, but then Apple crippled the experience by not implementing much…

> Most custom ROMs(including official LineageOS) are as secure, usually even more, than OEM ROM I definitely don't think that's the case. I'd check out the sections on microG and custom ROMs here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html (they're very knowledgeable, so usually factually accurate, but often frame or evaluate things in a very biased way IMHO, so be sure to evaluate the verifiable facts they state for yourself, and your own threat model). They're way more open to exploitation and far less secure than OEM ROMs, typically because of the way they have to pry open security stuff to get their various hacks to work. They are typically much better on privacy, but having your phone, from which you do all your communication and banking, and which has a dense cluster of sensors and transmitters that follow you wherever you go, be more open to exploitation by any random hacker or piece or malware seems like a bad idea to me.

Not really. Even with modern technologies, the Linux desktop technology stack is very, very far behind when it comes to security. The Linux kernel itself is a very weak foundation security-wise, the only way Android and ChromeOS get away with it is by using a very small feature set and restricting everything else as much as possible with seccomp, SELinux and heavy sandboxing. The Linux desktop userland doesn't have meaningful hardening features compared to other platforms (even Windows is ahead, sadly). For example, practically all distros use glibc's memory allocator which has both poor performance and security [1] and their toolchain is based on gcc, with no support for modern compiler security features such as CFI (with the sole exception of Chimera Linux). Not to mention the permission model is completely outdated, like in that xkcd cartoon. Flatpak only mitigates this partially, because the Flatpak sandbox is very weak. The people working on Flatpak are doing their best, but from reading some GitHub issues, it's clear they are badly overworked and not security experts. The person responsible for Flatpak's seccomp sandbox has said it isn't even his main responsibility and he doesn't have much knowledge about seccomp and is learning along the way [2]. The Flatpak seccomp filter is based on a denylist rather than an allowlist, and many dangerous syscalls can't be blocked because applications rely on them (e.g. Firefox needs ptrace for the crash reporter). You also have…

I'd stick to having a unified vfat boot+EFI partition mounted at /boot. systemd-boot is the simplest bootloader and it doesn't support loading it's config and kernels from non-vfat partitions anyway. Just make a 5GB boot+EFI partition so you can store plenty of kernels or even a recovery image. For security, I recommend following Madaidan's Insecurities Linux hardening guide, it has good explanations of most of the same sysctl options and kernel flags. [1] The only option that may be best left disabled is `init_on_free=0` since this is one of the few options that has a measurable performance impact (besides the normal spectre/meltdown related options). For NTP, systemd-timesyncd works fine and is probably the default for any modern distro. Desktop security is still a nightmare, if you use a Wayland based desktop environment and Pipewire for audio/video streams then maybe in 10 years you'll a secure clipboard and no unauthorized keyloggers. [1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html

From my experience (which isn't worth much but I have had similar thoughts about this) I went with a used iPhone 8 last year for around $180 because I thought it was going to get iOS 16, which it did. It's good until September next year (when the next iOS probably comes out) and at that point I will probably get a newer iPhone albeit probably a used one to save money. On custom ROMS, a security researcher named 'madaidan' states that ROMs such as Lineage are insecure (https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/security-privacy-advice.html#… with GrapheneOS being an exception. On the GrapheneOS website, it recommends getting a Pixel 6 and above which has 5 years of guaranteed full security updates (https://grapheneos.org/faq#recommended-devices). Louis Rossmann recently released a video talking about GrapheneOS as his daily driver and breaks down some usability misconceptions. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZmUINSvQ4)

You can replace it with a generic one to hopefully blend in https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html#m…

The person you replied to is right, the "security" of Linux might as well be nonexistent compared to macOS and especially iOS/Android. Even the developers of Secureblue (https://secureblue.dev/) state that despite their hardening and mitigations Linux still lags far behind macOS (and possibly Windows) security-wise. The only Linux derivative that has proper security is Android, and even better GrapheneOS. https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/linux-insecurities/ https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html I also commented here on Linux phones, the same can apply to Linux as a desktop OS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46997397 Also on top of that Linux/Windows laptops also lack the hardware-backed security that Macs and to an extent some Chromebooks have.

I'm gonna leave this here: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

How current is this still? Asking as a complete noob. I don't expect Firefox's architecture to have changed much, but it's been 3 years, so it could have improved a lot since this was written, and there are things I know about that are outdated in this document. For instance, the two mentioned Linux sandbox escapes [1] involve two things that have disappeared in many setups: X11 and pulseaudio. We now have Wayland and pipewire, which should both be better in this aspect IIUC. The mentioned bug related to X11 was also closed 3 years ago. [1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html#linux-s… [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1129492

I found this description about the security risks of rooting very eye-opening https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html It also explains the sandbox.

There's an article about insecurities in Firefox (<https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html>), which is a few years old now, but it made me curious as to whether it actually is better to run a Firefox fork, like Librewolf; Firefox itself; or a Chromium fork like Ungoogled Chromium. Unfortunately I don't really understand the implications about the security issues and I don't know whether any of the issues have been solved, so I don't know how to evaluate the security risks versus the privacy risks.

More like sanity tests. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

Eh, I tried using Firefox again for a few months when manifest v3 was announced, nothing worked quite right, then I ran into this: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

1. Chrome's security team has a very good reputation. 2. I don't know how accurate it is in 2024, but there are comparisons like https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html out there.

Agreed. A more recent one which is quite extensive, yet a bit old, is https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html

Chrome is more secure in aspects like the Sandbox. Check f.e. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

Reading https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html right now Shall I take each point and explain why they are bullshit ? Probably not, but do tell me. This kind of post is a perfect example of the bullshit I spoke about. Just a quote to illustrate: The Linux kernel's size grows exponentially across each release, and it can be thought of as equivalent to running all user space code as root in PID 1, if not even more dangerous. What the fuck.