Post
Topic
Board Trading Discussion
Re: About Mt. Gox flaw from a security expert
by
jgraham
on 21/06/2011, 20:56:57 UTC
Haha, Agreed. I'm not a Linux fanboy, but as soon as he started touting the security benefits of FreeBSD over the security Benefits of Linux he loses all credibility. The services that are normally exploited are generally run by multiple Unix clones. Securing a system takes an experienced *nix sysadmin and someone who understands networking and routing thoroughly, that's it.

...or the places where FreeBSD had to take stuff from Linux to secure itself.

As I've been saying from the beginning anyone who asserts there is some clear winner in "security".  Will probably fail in one of two things:


i) Defining "security' generally.

Muad_Dip while he did provide a definition.   It's rather incomplete he said that "It's a matter of counting flaws and uptime".  Especially when you consider he is talking about reported flaws (the vast majority of which have been fixed).  Not taking into account standard modeling practices.   Or providing a reference as to if uptime (or how much) is the result of security events.   In fact as you can see from the way he tends to use data that he assumes that not only is ALL uptime security related but with almost zero variance.

ii) Defending the point that system X is actually better by these criteria.

Similarly Muad_Dip gave us very little.  A database of flaws that are largely fixed.   No rationale as to why that means anything and some top 40 hosting services reliability index with no rational reason why things like DNS latency should be considered part of the equation.  A constant reference to the "top three' but a casual ignoring of the  bottom two FreeBSD machines which were an order of magnitude worse than any other system at all.  Oh and some silly evaluation from ten years ago with rather subjective and unweighted evaluations....using "smiley" and "frowny" faces as the markers of better or worse systems.   Really.   He even called this "objective" data.