Gentoo desktop?

[Christopher Browne]

On Jan 14, 2008 5:07 PM, Anthony de Boer <adb-tlug-AbAJl/g/NLXk1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 09:07:04PM -0500, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> > I am sure I could think of something to call you, but I am not sure
> > what.  Insisting on compiling things yourself does not make you a
> > programmer.  Paranoid is more likely.
>
> One of the early firewall publications (the FWTK manual, if I recall)
> had a cartoon of a worried-looking sysadmin with the caption "I'm
> paranoid.  But am I paranoid _enough_?"  That's the sort of work I've
> done over the past number of years, with firewalling and host security
> and application robustness and storage redundancy/backups.  (Is anyone
> hiring?!?)

The fact that you may watch a wave of lines like the following go
across your screen is *NOT* paranoid action that helps security.

gcc -O7  ${MOREFLAGDETERIORATA} -c some_file.c

You may *imagine* that you are avoiding some security problems, but in
reality, you're not, not unless you are scrutinizing every bit of code
that gets compiled.

It still is not enough even if you *are* scrutinizing the code.

Ken Thompson documented this nicely in his famous paper:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Quoting from it:
"No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you
from using untrusted code."

Unless you're actually auditing every bit of the code and patches that
Gentoo is claiming to be compiling for you, then you are NOT acting on
that paranoia in a fashion that actually provides *any* protection at
all.  And Thompson nicely documented that EVEN IF YOU ARE SCRUTINIZING
THAT CODE, you STILL have to trust the absence of nefarious purpose on
the part of the authors.

The guys wearing tinfoil hats because they are paranoid about the
government beaming things into their heads are doing something
ineffectual in not just one, but three ways:

1.  Firstly, they're idiots, because they are being paranoid about
something that's not happening.  ;-)
2.  Secondly, they are assuming that tinfoil hats are actually
providing any protection in the first place.  It is by no means
obvious that the hats would be effectual in the way they are supposed
to be.  (For instance, if I put probes in peoples' heads, I'd make
sure I ran an antenna down their spine...)
3.  Even assuming the hats worked, to some degree, at some point, they
have to take the hats off to sleep or to shower, at which point they
become vulnerable to the "mind control beams."  Oops.

If you don't trust the code that is being contributed to you, no
amount of "compiling from source" can truly help.  Being more paranoid
doesn't protect you from anything; it merely makes it more likely that
you'll look at the risks with diminished rationality, which is not
likely to improve your security situation.
-- 
http://linuxfinances.info/info/linuxdistributions.html
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting different results."  -- assortedly attributed to Albert
Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Rita Mae Brown, and Rudyard Kipling
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