SEVERAL years ago CentOS almost died; now it’s being embraced by Red Hat and one pundit from tech tabloid ZDNet is moving to CentOS Linux on the desktop [1,2].
CentOS is still in the news [3], with the CentOS project leader (Karanbir Singh) giving an interview to the Linux Foundation [4]. We trust CentOS, whereas trusting Red Hat is hard. RHEL is binary and based on news from half a decade ago, the NSA is said to be involved in the building process, as well as SUSE’s, whereas CentOS is built from source (publicly visible). Microsoft and the NSA do the same thing with Windows and it’s now confirmed that Windows has NSA backdoors.
Earlier this month vulnerabilities in RHEL’s openssl and RHEL’s gnupg [5,6], contributed even less to trust. RHEL is so standard in the industry that it would probably be simpler than other distributions to exploit; the NSA may as well have off-the-shelf exploits for all major RHEL releases, which are deployed in many countries’ servers (even so-called ‘rogue’ countries). Based on the NSA leaks, Fedora — not RHEL — is being used by the NSA itself to run its spying operations (e.g. collecting radio signals from afar). Fedora is not truly binary-compatible and its source code makes secrets hard to keep.
Lastly, mind the latest of Red Hat’s Fog Computing hype [7,8], including the CIA’s partner Amazon that’s lumped onto Red Hat [9,10] as part of a conference [11,12]. Avoid Amazon at all costs. It’s a malicious trap for many reasons. Amazon also pays Microsoft for RHEL after a patent deal with Microsoft, as we pointed out years ago. Suffice to say, Microsoft’s servers are as bad as Amazon’s for privacy.
RHEL and its derivatives continue to be deployed in many large networks of systems [13], so it’s clear why the NSA would drool over the possibility of back doors in RHEL. Watch out for that. Given the way NSA infiltrated standards bodies and other institutions, it’s not impossible that there are even moles at Red Hat or Fedora. There used to be some at Microsoft (we know about those who got caught).
Red Hat’s CEO is now telling his story in a Red Hat site [14] and one needs to remember who he used to work for (close to Boeing, which is primarily an army company), not just the country he is based on (hence the rules that apply to him, especially when he wishes to appeal to government contractors, DoD/Pentagon etc. which are the most lucrative contracts).
It should be noted that my Web sites are mostly running CentOS and the same goes for the host of Techrights, who focuses on security. With CentOS you can get the source code and redistribute; with Red Hat’s RHEL you can’t (it’s sold as binary).
There is definitely a good reason to trust CentOS security more than RHEL security. As for Oracle (“Unbreakable”), well… just read Ellison’s public statements in support of the NSA (never mind the company’s roots and the CIA). That tells a lot.
The bottom line is, blind faith in binary distributions is a bad thing. Blind faith in NSA partners (Red Hat collaborates with the NSA not just in SELinux) is even worse.
— source http://www.techrights.org/2014/01/17/rhel-security/ By Roy Schestowitz