Rolling vs. Stable release brainstorming

It’s more of an OS+hardware thing, not just software.. But yeah any vulnerability even if it’s only possible in a closed laboratory with internet speeds or hardware that only exist there then it should be reported to the developers. Quantum computers vs classical encryption is one example.

Like CONFIG_EDAC (Error Detection And Correction) and CONFIG_RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability)?

rasdaemon is a userspace logger so would that even work with the configs already set or would they conflict?

against radiation based attacks?

Like TEMPEST?

Most desktop environments as I recall, like Xfce are not using TEMPEST-resistant fonts by default.

Defense against soft TEMPEST via Ethernet acting as an antenna

This research in this video briefly mentions that Tails has TEMPEST resistant or hardened fonts but I cant find the cited source in the video but I’m pretty sure its “monospaced fonts” or fonts that don’t have “Anti-aliasing” (Disable Anti-Aliasing for Fonts).

For clarification, the radiation hardening thing was a bit of a joke. “Radiation hardened” is a term used on Code Golf Stack Exchange for a program that still behaves as intended even if you delete any single arbitrary character from the program (or in some instances, multiple arbitrary characters). This can be fun to do for small projects but would be extraordinarily difficult (maybe even impossible) for anything beyond that, as can be demonstrated by the ridiculous lengths people need to go to in order to make even a small radiation-hardened program. I only brought it up because it was vaguely similar to making programs immune to random bit flips in RAM, which IMO is usually impractical and the wrong way to handle the problem anyway. Like I mentioned earlier, the solution to RowHammer isn’t to make bit-flip-resilient software, it’s to prevent the bits from flipping in the first place.

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Does Kicksecure use “TEMPEST” resistant or hardened fonts like @desi_fubu mentioned above?

I believe TEMPEST-resistant fonts should be its own forum topic. It was only brought up in passing because of my comment about radiation-hardened software.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/8/2828 has some research done as to whether these fonts are effective or not. I can see an argument for including them, they do seem to help. There don’t seem to be any packaged in Debian yet, and I can’t even find them available for download, so I don’t think it’s something we can do soon (if at all). It does seem like a cool idea though.

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I noticed today in the qubes-public Matrix room that someone shared the following article:

It’s somewhat scary to see something manage to escape KVM with much less effort than one might expect, but this also makes me rethink my position about stable releases being safer in general. They’re safer against supply chain attacks certainly, but it seems like they aren’t particularly safe against AI-powered vulnerability development.

On the bright side, at least the VirtualBox packages we’re using are from Oracle upstream and very up-to-date. Hopefully that will make this a bit less awful for VBox users at least.

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thx I will do that with some research I’m aquiring and looking at.

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“A distribution with rapid updates is now a requirement. I love older, stable software, but the cycle of backporting patches is simply too long. An older distribution (like Debian 12, my old standby) that isn’t getting immediate upstream updates should be assumed vulnerable.”

Nice article, yeah basing on current distros releases which these distros are in themselves not matching the stable upstream packages releases = joke.

And there is no sane distro or even system exist at all which solves fully that (and other security issues), thats why i wrote operating system from heaven which sadly looks like either it wont be created at all or will pass my life until some people/company start it.