Why No Operating System Is Safe
Current operating systems aren’t safe enough for security-critical applications like Neuralink. Here’s the solution.
macOS is safe, right? At least more than buggy Windows, and if you really need security, choose Linux.
This is what many of us think about operating systems, and it’s totally wrong.
macOS isn’t safe — nor is Windows, Linux, or any other OS you know.
Many sites look into OS bugs, like Kernel.org Bugzilla, which features endless pages on bugs in upstream Linux kernels. The Linux kernel bug tracker lists over 3,300 bugs, as of writing.
Dmitry Vyukov, Senior Software Engineer at Google, presented findings at the Linux Security Summit that “every ‘look’s good and stable’ [Linux] release that we produce actually contains more than 20,000 bugs.”
Commerical software has orders of magnitude more bugs than the Linux kernel.
Linux, by the way, has over 2 billion users, all at risk of getting hacked. For many use-cases, a digital attack vector greater than virtually zero is unacceptable, like brain-computer interfaces or nuclear weapons.
