Re: Re: White paper: "Many Eyes" - No Assurance Against Many Spies

[James Walden <jwalden () eecs utoledo edu>]

Jeremy Epstein wrote:

I agree with much of what he says about the potential for infiltration of
bad stuff into Linux, but he's comparing apples and oranges.  He's comparing
a large, complex open source product to a small, simple closed source
product.  I claim that if you ignore the open/closed part, the difference in
trustworthiness comes from the difference between small and large.  That is,
if security is my concern, I'd choose a small open source product over a
large closed source, or a small closed source over a large open source... in
either case, there's some hope that there aren't bad things in there.


He makes three claims for greater security of his embedded OS:
        (1) A carefully controlled process for modifying source code.
        (2) Small size in terms of lines of code.
        (3) Auditing of the object code.
Certainly, a small, well-audited system is more likely to be secure than 
a large, poorly audited one.  Also, as there has been one discovered 
failed attempt to insert a backdoor into the Linux kernel, I agree that 
the potential for further such attacks exists.


However, his claim that Linux can never be made secure because it's too 
large to audit every time it changes is overstated.  He's ignoring the 
fact that few people (and even fewer in defence) will or should upgrade 
every time the kernel changes.  Widely used Linux distributions rarely 
include the latest kernel, even if your organization is using the latest 
distribution.  He's also confusing the difference between desktop and 
embedded Linux systems.  Yes, his embedded OS is small, but an embedded 
Linux system is going to be much smaller than the desktop distributions.


While kernel 2.6.5 may contain 5.46 million lines of code (counting 
blank lines and comments), much of that code is unlikely to be present 
in an embedded system.  After all, 2.72 million lines of code (49.8%) 
are drivers, 414,243 (7.6%) lines of code are sound-related, and 
another 514,262 (9.4%) lines are filesystem-related.  You're going to 
build your embedded system with the hardware drivers and filesystems 
that you need, not every possible device and obscure filesystem 
available.  The same is true for userspace setuid programs, which I'll 
not count as I'm not sure which ones would be necessary for the types of 
systems under discussion.


In summary, there are both fewer times and fewer lines of source code 
(and bytes of object code) that need to be audited than he claims. 
While auditing Linux is a more difficult task than auditing a smaller 
embedded OS, his claims are overblown since he ignores the fact that you 
only need to audit the parts and versions of the kernel (and OS) that 
you install and use when you install a new version.


--
James Walden, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor of EECS
The University of Toledo @ LCCC
http://www.eecs.utoledo.edu/~jwalden/