Hi, I’m in a process of making fast, (extrenely) secure, and modern laptop. Currently I have Arch Linux with encrypted root partition (unlocked with Nitrokey or long password), secure boot, linux-hardened, firewalld, etc.

I’m running linux-hardened with custom config. I enabled AMD SME, kernel lockdown, added some xanmod patch for more specific cpus, and disabled some unnedded drivers (only those that I’m 100% sure I don’t need - Intel, NVidia, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Virtio). Currently it takes ~50 minutes to recompile the kernel. Are there any tutorials what drivers to disable to speed up this process? After doing that I will try to compile it with -O3 and LTO. Do you know any patches for performance?

I’m planning to enable encrypted swap, install ClaimAV and install flatpak versions for every non open-source app I have.

I also want to have SELinux. Does anyone know where can I learn it? I had it on Fedora and it was not fun using it.

What are other ways I can make my laptop more secure?

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
    5·
    10 months ago

    Look at secureblue for more things

    • hardened malloc (preloading is somewhat complex for flatpaks)
    • maybe more kargs

    That custom kernel sounds very cool. Not sure if replacing it works on Fedora Atomic, would be very much needed

    SELinux confined users is also very important, SELinux is kinda contradictory to flatpak though, as they do the same things often and Flatpaks often dont work because they are not built for it.

    • chevy9294OPEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      I will try hardened_malloc, I already use it on my phone. I have GrapheneOS.

      • Pantherina@feddit.de
        2·
        10 months ago

        Same. It works really well, I am doing some kind of project building a hardened Firefox. It has hardened build parameters, removed jemalloc (so it uses hardened_malloc, otherwise it fails to start with memory issues), and I also experiment with various optimization flags as I have a x86_64-v4 intel CPU.

        This repo is also interesting.

        Secureblue has Chromium preinstalled with a hardening and also privacy policy, but I used googerteller and damn that thing pings Google every second, its scary.

        • chevy9294OPEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          Now I’ve installed it and Librewolf works nornally. Is that normal or is malloc not working or is Librewolf compiled with hardened malloc?

          I’ve heard about googerteller and I never thought someone will use it (except to try it)

          • Pantherina@feddit.de
            3·
            10 months ago

            Librewolf uses jemalloc and I have no idea but Flatpak browsers are not broken.

            I also asked Fedora people and Fedora Firefox also allows replacing the malloc, but as the package is already removed from the image you cant normally install it back.

            Yup, googerteller is damn scary. Chromium contacts Google when opening the profile picker, loading the addons, listing saved passwords