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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

>FileVault for professional use

Probably not the best choice :) you never want to use proprietary software if security is a concern

Go count how many CVEs have come out for OpenSSL, GNUTLS, LUKS, etc. and ask whether you’re offering helpful advice. Security is expensive and there are no silver bullets: at the end of the day you need a lot of skilled work and being open source doesn’t magically get that for free.

That's apples and oranges.

Counting published vulnerabilities in open source systems vs closed source systems says nothing about the relative true ratio of vulnerabilities.

Are you seriously claiming that anything short of omniscience is useless? In most fields people deal with incomplete data on a daily basis and this is no different. CVEs don’t tell you everything but they definitely give you more than zero, and more to the point, the many vulnerabilities in open source projects suggests that the very broad but completely unsupported claim I was responding to is based on ideology rather than reasoned analysis.

> the many vulnerabilities in open source projects suggests that the very broad but completely unsupported claim I was responding to is based on ideology rather than reasoned analysis

Does it? In order to claim that, one would have to have some idea of (a) the ratio of disclosed vulnerabilities to true vulnerabilities discovered in both open source, accessible code vs closed source, hardware locked code, and (b) the relative ratios of disclosed vulnerabilities.

Do you have any idea what either ratio might be? 1:1? 4:1? 1:4? 100:1?

Unless you know the true ratio, you can't claim that open source projects are better either. Or that one has advantages over the other when it comes to cryptographic security.

I'm not GP and I'm not arguing for either side, just pointing i tout.

Again, the comment I responded to made an absolute claim but, like you, had no supporting evidence. Unless one of you can produce some evidence it’s hard to support the belief that this is based on data.

If you read the thread, note that I’m not taking a side other than finding it absurd to claim that all open source products are inherently better than all proprietary products with no analysis or data.

I disagree. There are times when either no open-source solution is available, or the open-source solution is unmaintained, or not popular (thus not under much scrutiny) and you don't have the resources (time and skill) to audit it yourself.

As long as the incentives of the developer of the security scheme and the end-user are aligned (so no backdoors), I would trust a widespread, proprietary solution which appears to stand up to significant attacks (the solution being widespread means there are lots of efforts underway to crack it) more than an open-source implementation that nobody uses.

As it stands now, from my understanding, the failure case of the proprietary solution is the same level of security as the best case of the open source solution. So I don't see your point. Open source isn't any better.

Open source full disk encryption can be password cracked without limitations just like a hacked T2 chip. A sleeping open source full disk encryption machine can be accessed with enough skill to pull things out of frozen ram, etc.

What is a non-proprietary solution for full-disk encryption?

luks

luks or zfs.

Or Veracrypt.

I want not note, that ZFS is not full disk encryption. ZFS native encryption was designed to allow secure backups via "zfs send | zfs receive" mechanism, so it encrypt only data blocks, and not metadata.

LUKS and GEIL are full-disk encryption systems, and if you need FDE, you must use them under ZFS, not ZFS native encryption.

>LUKS and GEIL

GELI ;)

ZFS native encryption on Root is ~IS full disk encryption minus the boot-loader, i would say that's "full" interesting data encryption.

Technically true but what is the situation that become problem?

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