[tahoe-dev] Secure OS for running Tahoe?

[Greg Troxel]

Simon Forman <forman.simon at gmail.com> writes:

> Forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask this or if it's terribly
> naive, but could I get some recommendations for secure OSs to run
> Tahoe on?  I know there's OpenBSD, are they still near the top of the
> heap?  What about OKL4?

OpenBSD claims security as its first principle, but it's not clear that
it's significantly if any better than the other BSDs.

I am a user and developer of NetBSD, and I think it's a good choice for
tahoe.

Things to think about:

  off by default: you should operate a system with only things that you
  actually need running.  Windows, most Linux distributions and Mac all
  have issues here (at least FC did when I looked a year or so ago).  A
  default NetBSD installation will not be running any services.  I
  expect OpenBSD to be similar, and probably FreeBSD.

  responsive to security advisories, and ease of updating

  not being a standard target.  This is a bit controversial, but
  running a system that isn't run by 90% helps against standard
  attacks by script kiddies.  It will not necessarily help against a
  high-resource attacker that's after you specifically.  Being on other
  than Windows, and perhaps other than Mac or Linux helps here.  Also
  being on a CPU other than i386 or amd64.

  stable branch with good software engineering discipline.   Sometimes
  when there's an advisory, you have to update quickly.  With NetBSD,
  there is a stable branch for a major release, and it's really actually
  stable - updating along it, rebuilding, installing, rebooting is a
  sane thing to do.

  minimal system: if you are trying for security really seriously,
  you'll want a system with just enough code to do what you want, but
  not more.

  package management.  There are surely packages for tahoe in major
  linux distributions.   Tahoe and dependencies are up to date in
  pkgsrc, used on NetBSD.
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