There has been a steady uptick of people stating that they will migrate (or already have) to Debian – seeking refuge from what they see as greedy corporate influence. I understand the sentiment fully. However, there’s a problem here that I want to talk about: security.
The ugly truth is that security is hard. It’s tedious. Unpleasant. And requires a lot of work to get right.
Debian does not do enough here to protect users.
Long ago, Red Hat embraced the usage of SELinux. And they took it beyond just enabling the feature in their kernel. They put in the arduous work of crafting default SELinux policies for their distribution.
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However, its default security framework leaves much to be desired. Debian’s decision to enable AppArmor by default starting with version 10 signifies a positive step towards improved security, yet it falls short due to the half-baked implementation across the system.
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The fundamental difference between AppArmor and SELinux lies in their approach to Mandatory Access Control (MAC). AppArmor operates on a path-based model, while SELinux employs a significantly more complex type enforcement system. This distinction becomes particularly evident in container environments.
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The practical implications of these differences are significant. In a SELinux environment, a compromised container faces substantial hurdles in accessing or affecting the host system or other containers, thanks to the dual barriers of type enforcement and MCS labels.
TLDR: According to the author, Debian’s use of AppArmour is not as effective as RedHat’s use of SELinux when it comes to security.
The threat model seems a bit like fearmongering. Sure, if your container gets breached and attacker can (on some occasions) break out of it, it’s a big deal. But how likely that really is? And even if that would happen isn’t the data in the containers far more valuable than the base infrastructure under it on almost all cases?
I’m not arguing against SELinux/AppArmor comparison, SElinux can be more secure, assuming it’s configured properly, but there’s quite a few steps on hardening the system before that. And as others have mentioned, neither of those are really widely adopted and I’d argue that when you design your setup properly from the ground up you really don’t need neither, at least unless the breach happens from some obscure 0-day or other bug.
For the majority of data leaks and other breaches that’s almost never the reason. If your CRM or ecommerce software has a bug (or misconfiguration or a ton of other options) which allows dumping everyones data out of the database, SElinux wouldn’t save you.
Security is hard indeed, but that’s a bit odd corner to look at it from, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Debian or RHEL.
Debian can be a little slow patching things. However, like you said that’s probably not an issue. The biggest risk are large software packages like the Linux kernel and Chromium