Most secure operating system?

[T3sl4co1l]

Forget anything closed source because there is no possibility of verifying it or patching it and knowing it was verified or patched.  (1)

I wonder what the fraction of CVEs from OSS is, and how that compares to their market share?

Tim

[Jr460]

OpenVMS  -   Had an optional DoD approved mandatory security module back in late 80s.   Think of SELinux cranked to the max.   

Even without that module, all I could up with was one security CVE in the past 30 years.  And even that one, just disable  a very rare  command by anyone from users and your problem is gone.   Even at the that You can get to supervisor mode where the shell runs, not the ice, or kernel mode.   So basically you can screwup further commands in your process, not take over a system.  Or apply the patch.

I do know that at one time it was used as for DoD C2 guards, don't know if it still is.   The C2 guard is the only way to get data from an unclassified to classified network other than hand carry and have the incoming media scanned to death.

[Mr. Scram]

Looking at the subject, sparse opening post, member starting it and lack of subsequent participation this thread seems to be mostly intended to provoke yet another discussion about OSs.

[Mr. Scram]

Yep. I remember when they finally enforced UAC in Windows Vista. Many, if not most users found that infuriatingly annoying at the time. It took a lot of time and a lot of pedagogy so that people would eventually get used to it - let alone see the benefits.

Nothing has changed. Both people and companies with millions on the line still consider security a barely tolerable nuisance. Very few embrace it and design their systems and processes from the ground up around it. If you're lucky it's tacked on near the end.

[coppercone2]

Looking at the subject, sparse opening post, member starting it and lack of subsequent participation this thread seems to be mostly intended to provoke yet another discussion about OSs.

looks like the thread is working fine and its interesting to read, and now specific questions can be asked after a general review.

[george.b]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

[Karel]

Forget anything which is closed source.

Why?

Because opensource software contains less bugs?

Based on static analysis defect density, in the 2013 report, we found that open source code outpaced commercial code in quality.
This trend continues in 2014;

Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of code) of open source code and commercial code has continued to improve since 2013:
When comparing overall defect density numbers between 2013 and 2014, the defect density of both open source code and commercial
code has continued to improve. Open source code defect density improved from 0.66 in 2013 to 0.61 in 2014,
while commercial code defect density improved from 0.77 to 0.76.

Linux continues to be a benchmark for open source quality. By leveraging the Scan service,
Linux has reduced the average time to fix a newly detected defect from 122 days to just 6 days.
Since the original Coverity Scan Report in 2008, scanned versions of Linux have consistently achieved
a defect density of less than 1.0. In 2013, Coverity scanned more than 8.5 million lines of Linux code
and found a defect density of .61

https://news.synopsys.com/2014-04-15-Coverity-Scan-Report-Finds-Open-Source-Software-Quality-Outpaces-Proprietary-Code-for-the-First-Time

https://news.synopsys.com/2015-07-29-Coverity-Scan-Open-Source-Report-Shows-Commercial-Code-Is-More-Compliant-to-Security-Standards-than-Open-Source-Code

[T3sl4co1l]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

As with MS-DOS -- you can't have security issues if there's nothing secured.

Tim

[george.b]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

As with MS-DOS -- you can't have security issues if there's nothing secured.

Tim

Exactly it doesn't even support networking, by design.

[0culus]

Read and weep.

[borjam]

Operating system security is a very complex issue depending on many interconnected factors. Even the user interface is critical.

Architecture, design, and the quality of the software design process is critical as well. In that regard Apple was really ahead in the game for workstations with the relatively quiet adoption of comprehensive sandboxing.

At the same time, sadly, their software design rigor is going down the drain quickly. In a year or two they will reach Microsoftesque crap levels. Their software is falling apart and features that should just work now begin to fail randomly and silently with no explanation and no hope for debugging the reasons.

I guess all the good stuff was inherited from the good old NeXTStep years.

[PKTKS]

(..)
I guess all the good stuff was inherited from the good old NeXTStep years.

They did.  The folks there had the guts to ditch their crappy kernel..

And replace it with BSD.  Unfortunately they just "converted"
open source (free) in proprietary "Apple style"

MS is not  a software company. They bought a pile of stuff
from others and glued together - that pile they call OS.

Paid closed source drivers/blobs pushed with OEM sales
made a very profitable buzz.. Eventually falling apart.

Just a property holder umbrella - disguised into SAS
Paul

[borjam]

(..)
I guess all the good stuff was inherited from the good old NeXTStep years.

They did.  The folks there had the guts to ditch their crappy kernel..

There is a common misconception originating from the Linux crowd. Operating system = kernel. And that is
a wrong assumption. Actually, absurd.

They ditched a complete OS, building a new one and adding a compatibility layer (Carbon) so that legacy apps could be recompiled.

And replace it with BSD.  Unfortunately they just "converted"
open source (free) in proprietary "Apple style"

NeXTStep was Mach + BSD + NeXTStep object oriented stuff.

Macos X is Mach + FreeBSD + NeXTStep descendant object oriented stuff.

BSD was open source at the time (more or less) and FreeBSD is open source today. They haven't made the BSD part proprietary, Darwin is open source (the Mach + FreeBSD part).

MS is not  a software company. They bought a pile of stuff
from others and glued together - that pile they call OS.

That was in the MSDOS times. Windows is certainly their stuff.

And I forgot. Microsoft was probably the first software company in history serving the microcomputer market.

[PKTKS]

And I forgot. Microsoft was probably the first software company in history serving the microcomputer market.

I was using CP/M way before DOS.

And "Windows"  itself appeared when
they "suddenly" just took OS/2 interface...

in fact I used OS/2 pretty much the same at this time

Then.. they bought a thing called LAN Manager.
Which they "converted" into that SMB thing.
. till present day that thing is there..

Before CP/M (even before DOS itself) pretty much
i was confined into IBM stuff  VMS/OS

The way I see.. MS was just a cloud of problems
around 90's  - 80's DOS succeeded dumping CP/M

But since 2000?
they are just a laugh,,,

[free_electron]

secure, as in what and how ?

my vote is iRMx running from ROM (not flash , real hard unwriteable ROM).
Very hard to bring down. Even catastrophical memory failure doesn't bring that down.

I've told the story before , but : we ( begin the time i worked in the waferfab) had a ion implanter from Eaton. A -very- expensive piece of semiconductor machinery , and potentially very dangerous as it used hydrogen as a coolant ...
The machine was controlled by a 286 computer . industrial version of a standard PC. This machine booted from ROM containing an iRMX kernel. All memory was considered a ram drive. All applications were loaded from hardddisk in 'virtual partitions'.
This thing had a graphical user interface with touch screen and windowing. Every loaded object lived in its own 'container' ( think something like a virtual drive. the application or object cannot step outside of its container. it only knows its own world.)
items talk to each other passing messages. only the Os has access to load something. if a process or object 'hangs' : destroy the container and reload from disk. The data associated with a process lived in its own container. So that could be preserved and freshly loaded object could be reconnected to the operational state of the crashed one.

This thing was so bulletproof that even failing ram memory could not bring this machine down. The Os would detect parity errors in a segment and simply reload the appliction in a different location and reconnect it to the datapool and then mark this segment as 'bad'. just like in a harddisk. Weeks later , during scheduled downtime, we swapped the memory chips and ran the memtest , freeing that 'sector'.

The Os could never be hacked as it sat in rom and there was no way to 'write' that. It did not get copied to ram, it ran from rom. Any user world stuff was loaded from disk. since all those things lived in their own container there was no way to contaminate anything.

you booted in user mode or in admin mode. There was no way to switch between them apart form a hard system reset. in admin mode you could install new software . in run mode nothing could be written to the application section of the drive. only the data block was accessible for write. If i remember correctly there were two partitions. or two drives. it;s a long time ago.

i have never encountered any other kind of OS that could failing ram memory and keep running.

-edit- and today it is still around. www.tenasys.com . runs parallel with windows , on a multicore cpu it steals a single core and runs in its own section of hardware. you can allocate ow many instances of the os you need. Each grabbing its own core.
it can also run parallel with linux or some other Os's.

Worth reading up on as it is really designed to be a a true RTOS

[borjam]

And I forgot. Microsoft was probably the first software company in history serving the microcomputer market.

I was using CP/M way before DOS.

DOS was not the first Microsoft product.

And "Windows"  itself appeared when
they "suddenly" just took OS/2 interface...

OS/2 was a collaboration between IBM and Microsoft.

Before CP/M (even before DOS itself) pretty much
i was confined into IBM stuff  VMS/OS

You mean VM, VMS was Digital Equipment Corporation's operating system. By the way the
architect of Windows NT was the VMS architect.

[borjam]

my vote is iRMx running from ROM (not flash , real hard unwriteable ROM).
Very hard to bring down. Even catastrophical memory failure doesn't bring that down.

The challenge is keeping security with a rich, complex environment offering a myriad of functions.

[PKTKS]

DOS was not the first Microsoft product.

If I recall right it was a BASIC interpreter/compiler

They bought DOS to embed that.
Pretty much their default "modus operandi"

OS/2 was a collaboration between IBM and Microsoft.

until they managed to rip off whatever they needed
to jump off and just dump IBM - then the "File Manager"
they had (or SHELL) became Windows 1.x/2.x (aka 286)

You mean VM, VMS was Digital Equipment Corporation's operating system. By the way the
architect of Windows NT was the VMS architect.

Probably right my recollections from this early 80s are not
that accurate - too much stuff since then

There was also some other Burroughs and BIG main frames
to play over there this era... all pretty much vanished...

Paul

[fragile]

I guess the question itself is the red herring to draw attention from the real issue. On the one hand, we can't allow everyone to do as they please. On the other, we can't put everyone in prison as a safety measure. Security is a people thing. The system with best policies and enforcement will be the most secure.

Closed-source is very popular, so attacks are developed for it, so as to get the most bang for the effort expended. Every consumer-owned and operated Windows Desktop or laptop is a sewer pipe for malware. But it doesn't serious alter performance,  invade privacy, or destroy data. It is being spewed out like an infected cell spews  copies of a virus, but the viruses in this case don't do anything but multiply on a typical Windows installation. The targets are servers running certain services on certain ports.

If you connect a packet filter to a Windows machine, you can watch the packets headed all over creation! Thousands an hour sometimes! The antimalware publishers just ignore that stuff. They focus on ransomware: which just bounces off linux, keylogging and remote control trojans, cryptomining trojans, and stuff that really bothers users.

Open-source is very unpopular, so it really doesn't attract malware authors. That, and when Linux is exploited, rebooting remedies it completely. Mac is a fork of BSD UNIX. It has a handful of closed-source tools that make it impossible to use the same way as UNIX. But a lot of standard tools are there. The fork is Darwin, which Apple crafts into Mac like Google crafts Android from Debian Linux.

So, which bullet-proof vest is the most secure? Ok, what if your inside a tank? In mission critical systems, like financial transaction clearing, if any unauthorized hardware is installed, removed or replaced, anywhere within a critical global network, the person in charge of that area will be notified within 30 seconds to disconnect the segment until it can be resolved.

Security is like that.     

     

[electrolust]

in the vein of the question, ie context-free except for the mention of "OpenBSD", MacOS 10.15 -- by far.

going a bit deeper, SEL4 followed by QubesOS.