Not really DevOps, but it's my main ("desktop") OS. I know it well, it's pretty damn secure, and it's an excellent development environment - good docs and lots of features that crash bad software.
The unsaid thing here is Linux is largely not used by sysadmin/unix types. Devops has driven this bloat so that people new to the field can just not have to learn any fundamentals about the OS they're building their tools on. For rapid "move fast and break things" VC nonsense, this is a great match. For efficiency, correctness, and long-term maintainability and security, it's a nightmare.
I like to comment DevOps from a security perspective, a trend I noticed in my day job.
Windows is/was often bashed for being insecure. Lots of that stems from the decades of development related to centralized management solutions. A default windows workstation in a domain setting will open a bunch of ports, a bunch of which can be used for command execution. The attack surface for this system includes, but is not limited to:
- Remote access with local admin users via tools such as SMBExec, wmiExec, DCOM, Psexec, Powershell remoting
- Remote access domain admin users access via the same
- Local/domain admin access via RDP
- Remote domain admin access via group policy
All these have had their own associated vulnerabilities over the years. Examples are SMB relay attacks, which enabled an attacker to abuse flaws in NetNTLM and obtain access to machines by relaying other people's credentials. And then we're not even talking about the 'real' exploits, Eternal Blue, Eternal Romance, Blue Keep, MS14-068, MS08-067, and on and on.
Pentesters, researchers and Microsoft have been hammering away the kinks for years now. The 'fixes' and root causes for each individual issue are well understood and each new domain functional level increases the security of a default windows Domain by leaps and bounds.
When you look at the Unix/Linux side you'd see that no such attack surface ever existed. You manage your systems over SSH, and this can still be bad, an easily guessable root password shared between Dev, testing and production is still a death sentence. But by default there were no tier0 systems in your network, apart from those of sysadmins.
But now with DevOps things are changing on that side. With Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, your various container management systems, the CI pipeline, jenkins and numerous development teams able to push both to infra repositories and your actual products this has changed:
You use an automated CI pipeline? Any system in the chain is a tier0 system.
Your developers are maintainer status or higher in your source repositories? Then they are domain admin or equivalent. They can disable protected branches, push a backdoor, and watch their attack propagate through the pipeline.
Did you make it inconvenient for your developers to access various build systems? Then they are sharing credentials to these systems over your company chat.
It seems, from what I've seen so far, that while the 'architecture' of modern mass centralized IT management and development is more secure. You can't relay an SSH key for example, like you can in NetNTLM. But the institutional knowledge isn't there yet. New attack surface has opened up, and infosec people have not yet completely caught up with the new 'eggs' in the basket, even if they are aware.
Admittedly, I develop desktop software, so my experience with 'devops' has been in managing build infrastructure, but I found that the tools and overall philosophy of the movement has empowered my team to control our own infrastructure and actually get things done.
Security was also improved when I started documenting how our VMs were created (and automated it via packer). In the process, I switched them from unlicensed, never-been-updated RHEL boxes to CentOS.
reply