| > Isn't a Ubuntu server secure out of the box? I think people working at RedHat are more competent in moving security forward on Linux than what Ubuntu does. Ubuntu hardly innovates at all. Its target market seems to be desktop users (or server admins that are only familiar with the Desktop version). Personally I wouldn't put Ubuntu (or any other distribution) on a server without an elaborate playbook to tailor it to my needs (on Ubuntu that playbook is always more complex from my experience). This is where Ubuntu fails for me because it makes some weird assumptions as to what I want in terms of security (which are absent in Debian). YMMV. Although I think that a distribution's goal should be accessibility and configurability - in that regard all of them don't prioritize security features as much as I'd like to see (but knowing myself I probably would complain the second these features become too opinionated - which they most certainly would - which is why I think Debian does the right thing with not making opinionated assumptions). Ubuntu compared to Debian standard install is more bloated, interim releases are much buggier, and Ubuntu LTS is less stable than Debian stable. Ubuntu's root certificate store is constantly outdated (though the same issue might also be on Debian). Their apparmor configuration lags behind, ... whatever is good they usually inherit from Debian. All distributions could do more to lock down processes with seccomp-filters in systemd. Would be interesting to see what lynis⁰ discovers when comparing a fresh server install between Ubuntu and others. In over 20 years I have seen some real shit-shows in production with all distributions except Debian (again ymmv). Jason Donenfeld, the creator of Wireguard said about Ubuntu on the latest¹ SCW podcast: > Ubuntu is always, a horrible distribution to work with, ... > Well, they [Ubuntu] sort of inherit from Debian, but they're like not super tuned in to what's going on and like not really on top of things. And so it was just always, it's still a pain to like make sure Ubuntu is working well. but I don't know, it's not too much interesting to say about the distro story, just open source politics as usual. while somewhat anecdotal I trust that Jason knows what he is talking about having been on the linux security kernel team for ages and familiar with the quirks of various downstream vendors. His development cycle for WG is: implement -> decompile -> formal-verification -> rinse/repeat :-/ All of Linux security is a shit show. This is why grsecurity is charging money for it's service. ⁰ https://cisofy.com/lynis/ ¹ https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/... |
Uhh what? Isn't it's largest target cloud/server distro deployment?
> Ubuntu's root certificate store is constantly outdated
Uhh for me cacerts updates what twice a year? Certainly it's a lot easier for me to keep it updated on ubuntu than rhel/centos.
>Their apparmor configuration lags behind, ... whatever is good they usually inherit from Debian.
Apparmor and SELinux are objective failures for the most part. The entire point of snap/flatpaks is to hide away the nonsense configuration in favor of an actual permission model. I would say snaps are actually enabling apparmor to be used and enforced unlike the generic apparmor profiles generated.
>Jason Donenfeld, the creator of Wireguard said about Ubuntu on the latest¹ SCW podcast:
What specific aspects is he referring to here? Wireguard has been baked into the kernel. I can understand packaging updates being a mess, and updating universe/lts but that is problematic for every Linux OS out there.
This is precisely why snaps were introduced. You now have apparmor/seccompf enforced permission model and an easy way for developers to directly push to multiple Ubuntu versions without having to worry about OS compatibility.