At the Red Hat Summit last week, Josh Bressers, who heads the Red Hat Product Security Team explained that the security process involves both manual and automated activities for quality assurance. Linux is further reinforced with what Dan Walsh, senior principal software engineer at Red Hat called a “silver bullet” for Linux security — SELinux.
“We have this unbelievable code that sees if someone is doing something stupid,” Walsh said.
SELinux, which provides mandatory access controls, was originally developed by the NSA. It has been part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux since the 4.0 release.
Open Source Security Challenges
As opposed to a proprietary model of software development, open source by definition is open. Code, whether it is good, bad or indifferent, is there for all to see and expose. The issue of whether or not security risks can ever be eliminated entirely is one that Linux will likely not solve.
“It’s not a solvable problem. As long as humans write code there will be bugs,” Bressers said. “The problem we suffer from in the land of open source is the emperor is naked and we can’t sneak bug fixes in.”
Read the full story at eSecurity Planet:
Can You Completely Secure Linux?
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.