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What is your opinion of hypervisors? Couldn't they be considered the next best thing - a compromise between hardware compat and isolation? ^HU

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Oct 30, 2018

Replying to @DanielMicay and @Whonix

The Linux kernel is the equivalent of running the entirety of userspace as root in PID 1. There's no isolation or internal security model. It keeps getting worse as more and more complexity is piled on, all of it implemented in C and without any isolation between components.

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I think the

approach makes a lot of sense. It's a very pragmatic way to deal with this growing problem. Every Linux kernel release is substantially more complicated than the last, with more attack surface and more ways for things to go wrong internally.

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Software is written to run on Linux (desktop, server, Android) though, and a more secure OS without applications for it isn't much good. I think in the long term, the ideal would be having a robust microkernel with drivers, filesystems, etc. divided up and isolated well.

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It needs a way to run existing applications though. The virtualization approach is the most realistic / pragmatic right now. Ideally, I'd like to see a Linux compatibility layer able to avoid having the Linux kernel in the guest, and virtualization could also become optional.

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I think github.com/google/gvisor is very cool, but it isn't quite what I want since it's designed to run on top of the Linux kernel on the host. It's close to what I want though: a memory safe Linux kernel API implementation able to run without privileges. It's at least progress.

5:19 PM · Oct 30, 2018Twitter Web Client

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Microsoft successfully implemented a solid Linux compatibility layer for Windows without deriving it from the Linux kernel, and what I'd like to see is something similar targeting a robust security-oriented microkernel to have "Linux" without the Linux kernel's implementation.

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Over the years I saw similar projects come from Google like novm, unfortunately they never graduated beyond proof-of-concept stage.

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github.com/google/gvisor is more than a proof of concept, and the KVM platform implementation is close to what I want. It provides a way to have a "Linux" virtual machine without a Linux kernel. It runs on top of Linux on the host though, so it'd need to be ported elsewhere.

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