so before learning about a secure os like tails or cubes or anything else, it's important to understand how operating systems work in general.
this won't be a comprehensive guide on the deep inner workings of operating systems, but we do want to explain at a high level what the purpose of a secure operating system is and comparing it to something like a normal operating system.
but before we can do that, we need to understand how operating systems actually work.
so an operating system at the most basic level, sits above the hardware and interacts with the hardware of your computer or device and allows you to run things on top of it like applications or software.
the operating system is what communicates with that hardware, with your cpu, your memory, your graphics card, everything in between.
the operating system helps control that flow of information and control how the software and applications actually function.
you can have really large operating systems like a windows or a mac operating system, which are large files, large installs, or you can have really, really slim operating systems down to even more of container approach where you have things that are nearly distroless where it's only the raw things you need to operate something like a container or a microservice.
but in the scope of what we're talking about, we're talking about those larger ecosystem operating systems, things like windows, things like macos, things like ios and android, and even linux.
all of these are larger oses that come with a lot of things packaged with it to allow you to work effectively.
each operating system might differ in terms of their interface and how you access them, but the core concepts remain the same.
they allow you to do things on top of your hardware and access different services, systems, and applications.
android, mac, windows, those are all types of operating systems that exist.
so you can have operating systems that are for the phone or you can have them for a computer.
you can also have operating systems for like a raspberry pi, or you can have server operating systems like windows server or the red hat server.
and throughout the courses here on dark web academy, we'll talk about things like tails and cubes and other secure oss.
and those are mainly going to be desktop based workstation oss.
those are not server oss and those really aren't things that are slimmer meant for raspberry pi or thin clients or anything like that.
so the real power of an operating system comes when you have multiple software and apps on top of the operating system because the operating system allows those to communicate together.
certain software can feed into other software.
certain apps can feed into other apps, and the operating system underneath it all allows that communication flow to happen smoothly.
this is why you can have things like an email link and when you click the link in the email, it opens your browser and opens up the link in the browser.
that would be an example of the operating system facilitating that flow of data to allow those links to happen across multiple different software tools.
the concern about operating systems though, comes in when, what if a software or a tool wants to maliciously access something?
say you have a browser and you have a chat app, and normally they're not supposed to communicate, but your browser, because it has lacks security permissions on the operating system, can get information from your chat app.
in that scenario, and this is a fictitious scenario, but it could happen, if you visited a certain website and it ran a certain script on your computer, which looked for any installed chat applications and pulled the logs from that chat application.
if you don't have proper security in place on your operating system, it won't stop that from happening.
now, modern operating systems do have security in place to stop this sort of thing.
they have protection, they have antivirus, they have security controls to make sure that different applications are not going overboard and accessing things they shouldn't.
but these tools are not perfect.
they have issues and the operating themselves sometimes come into question because they have access to everything.
so it's always a question of what are they getting info on and what are they sending back as telemetry or data that they want?
so that's a high level overview of operating systems.
in the next video, we're going to talk about operating system security to understand kind of that default security that we mentioned that does exist with operating systems.