USENIX Magazine research recognizes openSUSE infrastructure security

The security of the way how openSUSE delivers its content has been recognized by a paper in ;login, the USENIX association's magazine. According to the article, openSUSE is the only community Linux distro that's on par with enterprise Linux distributions in protecting against recently discovered package management vulnerabilities.

This is a combined result of the design of metadata, of client features and the setup chosen by openSUSE - and MirrorBrain. MirrorBrain plays a central role because it provides cryptographic signatures and allows fine-grained configuration to make sure that certain key files are always delivered directly.

The goal of this is that users can download software and deploy updates safely even though they're obtaining them through a decentralized system of community maintained mirrors.