Chalk another one up for "Antiviruses causing more problems than solving them".
They 'worked' when they initially just scanned files for known malicious signatures. Now they're the equivalent of a sledgehammer to a wall with all of the extra bells & whistles strapped to them.
Application whitelisting is the remaining way forward if you actually care about runtime security. That & locking every access point down to the bare minimum.
I would say white listing will have to happen for everything in the near future: applications, ports, URLs (including fragments!), filesystem hierarchies, basically everything.
I'm not sure it's doable with current OS architectures, though.
- you need to specify the rules before starting an application. How one is supposed to guess what application will do? Figuring out the correct rules may take lot of time and is impossible for non-programmers. Imagine I want to install 10 apps per day and they should work perfectly, how much time will I be spending writing rules?
- the rules are too limited. You can restrict access to a file, but can you restrict access to a DBUS bus? Can you restrict access to audio, video, GPU etc? To /proc filesystem? To a DNS domain? The rules feel like they were written for computers with teletypes from 70s and not for modern machines.
- they do not allow providing fake data, for example, a fake list of WiFi points so that the app thinks it has the access to your geolocation while in reality is doesn't.
So it is some outdated technology unfit for modern day.
What does a user want? The user wants to be able to run anything without any risk and without writing any config files. Obviously it takes a skill to write such OS, and there is definitely a lack of people with this skill among Linux distribution creators.
A system where installation is done using "curl + sudo bash" is the opposite of a safe OS.
They 'worked' when they initially just scanned files for known malicious signatures. Now they're the equivalent of a sledgehammer to a wall with all of the extra bells & whistles strapped to them.
Application whitelisting is the remaining way forward if you actually care about runtime security. That & locking every access point down to the bare minimum.
I'm not sure it's doable with current OS architectures, though.
- you need to specify the rules before starting an application. How one is supposed to guess what application will do? Figuring out the correct rules may take lot of time and is impossible for non-programmers. Imagine I want to install 10 apps per day and they should work perfectly, how much time will I be spending writing rules?
- the rules are too limited. You can restrict access to a file, but can you restrict access to a DBUS bus? Can you restrict access to audio, video, GPU etc? To /proc filesystem? To a DNS domain? The rules feel like they were written for computers with teletypes from 70s and not for modern machines.
- they do not allow providing fake data, for example, a fake list of WiFi points so that the app thinks it has the access to your geolocation while in reality is doesn't.
So it is some outdated technology unfit for modern day.
What does a user want? The user wants to be able to run anything without any risk and without writing any config files. Obviously it takes a skill to write such OS, and there is definitely a lack of people with this skill among Linux distribution creators.
A system where installation is done using "curl + sudo bash" is the opposite of a safe OS.