My point exactly. A large attack surface means less secure. My point was that Kali isn’t focused on being a secure OS. It is all about the tools. Even without a vulnerability, a secure OS should protect against unknowns.
I’m the Never Ending Pie Throwing Robot, aka NEPTR.
Linux enthusiast, programmer, and privacy advocate. I’m nearly done with an IT Security degree.
TL;DR I am a nerd.
My point exactly. A large attack surface means less secure. My point was that Kali isn’t focused on being a secure OS. It is all about the tools. Even without a vulnerability, a secure OS should protect against unknowns.
Ubuntu font. Idk why but I like it.
Eventually it’ll trickle down.
PCs aren’t secure. Linux default isnt secure. Kali has so many apps/tools installed by default that it isnt comparable to default Linux. It has massive attack surface and no security design, therefore calling it secure isn’t accurate.
If no effort was put into the security design of an OS, why call it secure?
Alt text: When water’s temperature falls below 0°C, it undergoes Bouba to Kiki.
Pic: The picture has a diagram showing water above freezing being flowy and liquid, and below freezing being rigid and icy. Many people find the sounds Bouba and Kiki to match visually to the look of rounded and pointy shapes respectively.
Operating systems can function very different. When creating software (like video games) the developer has to understand or use software dependencies which interact with the OS in a number of specific (OS dependent) ways. Stuff like where is app/user data stored, how to connect to the internet, how to display stuff on the screen (2D), how to display complex 3D geometry on the screen fast (3D graphics acceleration), where the host OS stores shared libraries (and what kind of libraries can the software expect to always be available), what security restrictions the host OS has, what filesystem the host OS uses, how to access the keyboard and mouse, how to interact with the kernel (very important).
Since Windows and Linux are so very different, built for different purposes by different developers, it is impossible to take a Windows exe and run it on Linux.
These days, the WINE project, with help from Valve’s fork Proton, is able to run basically any Windows game on Linux with similar performance (if not better because Linux is lighter to run than Windows). It does this by creating a environment for the software/game that provides all of the OS stuff Windows software expects and translating it to Linux specific things.
TLDR: Linux is very different from Windows. Software meant for Windows won’t work natively on Linux (since everything is different). For Windows software to work on Linux, the WINE translates all the Linux specific OS stuff and creates an environment for the Windows software that feels like Windows. Most things work with WINE except exceedingly complex stuff, like browsers which have native Linux versions anyways.
Thanks for some updated context.
What do you mean secure by design? What part of it is secure. Compare it to actually security focused Linux operating systems like QubesOS, Kicksecure, or Secureblue. Literally any OS that supports the Brace tool (made by the creator of DivestOS) is much more secure than Kali Linux. Kali is purpose built for red team work, not being secure (aka reducing attack surface or designing around a threat model).
You mention “sane defaults”. That might mislead someone because it is ambiguous. The terminal defaults used to default to a root prompt, exemplifying that it isn’t a distro focused on sane defaults for a desktop distro.
Kali is a tool for a specific job. Its meant mostly for hacking or troubleshooting/analysis, being an OS for executing a collection CLI/TUI and GUI utils.
-Edited everything to make myself more intelligible.
It isn’t a secure operating system. It is a toolkit for pen testing and red team hackers. Definitely not a daily driver kind of OS.
Your god damn right.
I am kidding obviously, I stress about people looking at me.
For good out-of-the-box nvidia support, I recommend Bazzite.
For nvidia hardware, use nvidia images of Aurora/Bluefin (or Bazzite if you want gaming out of the box). All the OSes I mentioned are based on Fedora Atomic and offer image options for nvidia proprietary drivers. They even signing the kernel drivers, so you can use Secure Boot.
-> UEFI IRC client written in Rust
Docker is good when combined with gVisor runtime for better isolation.
gVisor is an application kernel, written in memory safe Golang, that emulates most system calls and massively reduces the attack surface of the kernel. This is important since the host and guest share the same kernel, and Docker runs rootful. Root inside a Docker container is the same as root on the host, as long as a sandbox escape is used. This could arise if a container image requires unsafe permissions like Docker socket access. gVisor protects against privilege escalation by only using root at the start and never handing root over to the guest.
Sydbox OCI runtime is also cool and faster than gVisor (both are quick)
Comic credit: Haus Of Decline
I am not a troll. You don’t need to be an ass.
Just because a system doesnt have a CVE doesn’t make it secure. It needs proper exploit mitigations. Read why Linux isn’t secure here.. The article is written by the lead developer of Whonix OS (Security hardened Debian with a focus on anonymity). If you had checked out any of the references from my previous comments you would have learned more about why I have this opinion.
Kali isn’t any more secure than regular Debian, while also having a larger attack surface, and no kernel hardening, protecting of GUI, or application isolation. What makes it “secure”?