Dan Harkless' Secure UNIX OSes Buying Guide: Introduction

Since all non-Enterprise, non-Fedora versions of Red Hat will have been end-of-lifed as of April 2004 (the Fedora Legacy Project notwithstanding), I needed to pick a new server OS. I've always wanted to try one of the security-focused open source UNIX OSes, but in past surveys of the field, I've found that very few of the candidates are affordable, stable, suitable for a production server, and have enough security enhancements to make it well worth using them rather than a more mainstream OS.

So I did another survey in February 2004, the results of which you can see in the database linked to below. Unfortunately it's still the case that very few OSes meet the above criteria. OpenBSD is still the clear winner. It would be nice if there were a secure Linux distribution that was just as suitable and mature, so one could leverage the benefits of the larger Linux development community, its much broader hardware support, full support for non-open-source binaries compiled for Linux, etc., without having to sacrifice security. OpenNA looks to be in the best position of the Linux offerings, but it doesn't appear to be very widely known or used, and it has a few serious flaws.

I can't promise to keep this table constantly maintained as new OS versions come out, but if you want to send me updates or additions, I will certainly include them, time permitting.

Now, you can either view the database on:

or:

The latter is useful for side-by-side comparison of any two or more records, or to keep field headings always on screen without having to repeat them within the table. Note that you can resize the frames as desired (e.g. to make the top frame only big enough for the column headings).

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Dan Harkless
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