this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Does anyone know of a hosting service that offers Silverblue as a possible choice for OS?

It seems to me that for a server running only docker services the greatly reduced attack surface of an immutable distro presents a definitive advantage.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (11 children)

An attacker escaping from a container can’t be system root as Podman runs rootless (without some other exploit or weak password).

That would be true of podman running anywhere, and is not unique to an immutable distribution.

The filesystem itself is also read-only.

You can change that real quick if you have root access.

[–] asap 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (10 children)

edit: "Immutable" means "all of them are the same", not "unchangeable".

~~You sound confident, but the fact that Fedora is using the term "immutable" makes me wonder if you actually have domain expertise here.~~

~~Immutable means immutable. It would be strange for them to call it that if it actually means "completely irrelevant from a security perspective".~~

~~Unless you provide some evidence to the contrary I'm going to assume you aren't correct.~~

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Someone with root can run ostree admin unlock --hotfix to make /usr writable. Someone with root can also delete all restore points.

It would be strange for them to call it that if it actually means “completely irrelevant from a security perspective”.

See the comment by superkret.

[–] aordogvan 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

While what you're saying is theoretically true, don't forget that as far as I know, most attacks are perpetrated by bots. And while it is true that in a fedora based version one could run ostree admin unlock etc... this particular command would need to be included in the attack script.

Now if the script has to be modified to include all possible different immutable systems that could possibly run it would increase the complexity and most importantly the size of said script making it easier to detect.

I'm not saying that its a bulletproof method, I'm just saying that by itself it greatly minimizes the risk, at least until all servers run immutable systems. And even then it still complicates matters for potential attackers quite a bit. So therefore reducing or at least greatly minimizing the potential of the system being compromised.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Because even if an attacker could gain access even as root he cannot modify system files.

Your comment was already from the position of if an attacker could gain root access. My responses were to that directly, and nothing else.

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