Operating system diversity?
Hi All, In the recent thread relating to Debian relay Puppet modules it was suggested that a greater diversity of operating systems in tor nodes wooudl be preferable. I'm not sure if this was meant as a technical or aesthetic preference, but I am curious. Is there any technical benefit to rounning a more diverse set of opensource oprating systems for tor nodes? I discount closed source as we don't know what's going on in there. Would that present significantly different attack surfaces? I can imagine a vulnerability in the TCP stack or other kernel functionality in Linux would not be the saem in FreeBSD or vice versa... My nodes are currently Ubuntu but if there's a reason to do so I coould possibly switch OS to FreeBSD (or hurd does tor run on hurd :)) -Jon
On 17. Juni 2014 at 17:26:42, Jonathan D. Proulx (jon@csail.mit.edu) wrote:
I'm not sure if this was meant as a technical or aesthetic preference, but I am curious. Is there any technical benefit to rounning a more diverse set of opensource oprating systems for tor nodes? I discount closed source as we don't know what's going on in there.
Hi Jonathan, in the mentioned thread I agreed with the suggestion because I have always supposed that the more platforms and operating systems are supported, the easier it is to adopt the given technology. In my case, I was already running a Debian server and I thought it was a good idea to share some of its resources with the Tor community, and it was *very* easy. I guess there are others in my same situation (i.e. wanting to run a relay) but maybe running a different OS / distribution, and they give up because they don’t want or they can’t invest time in spinning up a new server just for that, or similar scenarios. By the way, I’m also curious to hear about technical and security implications -- Alexander Fortin http://about.me/alexanderfortin
On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Jonathan D. Proulx <jon@csail.mit.edu> wrote:
I'm not sure if this was meant as a technical or aesthetic preference, but I am curious. Is there any technical benefit to rounning a more diverse set of opensource oprating systems for tor nodes? I discount closed source as we don't know what's going on in there.
Would that present significantly different attack surfaces? I can imagine a vulnerability in the TCP stack or other kernel functionality in Linux would not be the saem in FreeBSD or vice versa...
My nodes are currently Ubuntu but if there's a reason to do so I coould possibly switch OS to FreeBSD (or hurd does tor run on hurd :))
These surface differences result in real world immunities. If all you're running is one thing, and that one thing gets cracked, it's over. This happens all the time. And it's not just the kernel, it's also the differences in libraries, etc. So yes, for that purpose regarding the Tor network, don't pick Linux or Windows. If you want to play and learn something new and not closed source, pick one of the BSD's... free, open, dfly, net. FreeBSD is the obvious general choice, the others will subject you to more specific challenges. 4796 Linux 1650 Windows 294 FreeBSD 75 Darwin 35 OpenBSD 9 NetBSD 4 Bitrig 2 SunOS 2 GNU/kFreeBSD 2 DragonFly
On 14-06-17 01:51 PM, grarpamp wrote:
On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Jonathan D. Proulx <jon@csail.mit.edu> wrote:
I'm not sure if this was meant as a technical or aesthetic preference, but I am curious. Is there any technical benefit to rounning a more diverse set of opensource oprating systems for tor nodes? I discount closed source as we don't know what's going on in there.
Would that present significantly different attack surfaces? I can imagine a vulnerability in the TCP stack or other kernel functionality in Linux would not be the saem in FreeBSD or vice versa...
My nodes are currently Ubuntu but if there's a reason to do so I coould possibly switch OS to FreeBSD (or hurd does tor run on hurd :))
These surface differences result in real world immunities. If all you're running is one thing, and that one thing gets cracked, it's over. This happens all the time. And it's not just the kernel, it's also the differences in libraries, etc. So yes, for that purpose regarding the Tor network, don't pick Linux or Windows. If you want to play and learn something new and not closed source, pick one of the BSD's... Free, open, dfly, net. FreeBSD is the obvious general choice, the others will subject you to more specific challenges.
4796 Linux 1650 Windows 294 FreeBSD 75 Darwin 35 OpenBSD 9 NetBSD 4 Bitrig 2 SunOS 2 GNU/kFreeBSD 2 DragonFly
Within the (GNU/)"Linux" category there are significant differences among the distros. One obvious example is they dont all ship with the same OpenSSL version. Something as simple as enabling and configuring the firewall (or adding a firewall layer like a router) can set your relay apart from most of the default installs out there. Compiling Tor or the kernel or libevent, for example, with different versions of the compiler or custom options can give different behaviour to attacks. My point being, if you dont know an operating system well, it may not be safer to put a relay on it. Perhaps better to maintain an O/S you know well, study its security properties, and use customizations to give it a different attack surface.
participants (4)
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Alexander Fortin -
grarpamp -
Jonathan D. Proulx -
krishna e bera