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Comment by chaxor | Hacker News Reader

I'm not versed in this, so apologies for the stupid question, but wouldn't statically linking be more secure, if anything? Or at least have potentially better security?

I always thought the better security practice is statically linked Go binary in a docker container for namespace isolation.

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If there is a mechanism to monitor the dependency chain. Otherwise, you may be blissfully unaware that some vulnerability in libwhatever is in some binary you're using.

Golang tooling provides some reasonable mechanisms to keep dependencies up to date. Any given C program might or might not.

> If there is a mechanism to monitor the dependency chain.

So that would not be less secure, but it would also not make it more secure than dynamic linking with a good mechanism, right?

Personally, I think any inherent security advantage (assuming it has great dependency management) would be very small. This "Oasis" project doesn't seem to call it out at all, even though they are making a fair amount of effort to track dependencies per binary.

They cite the main benefits being this: "Compared to dynamic linking, this is a simpler mechanism which eliminates problems with upgrading libraries, and results in completely self-contained binaries that can easily be copied to other systems".

Even that "easily be copied to other systems" sort of cites one of the security downsides. Is the system you're copying it to going to make any effort to keep the transient statically linked stuff in it up to date?

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