Fedora 23 Beta Upgrades Security, Usability in Linux OS

Fedora Linux developers are touting security enhancements in the latest beta release of their open source platform, Fedora 23. Here’s a look at what’s new in the OS, which serves as a proving ground for Red Hat (RHT) products.

Red Hat announced the beta release of Fedora 23 on Sept. 22. Among the main improvements in the new version are behind-the-scenes security enhancements—specifically, compile-time tweaks—that help to bolster Fedora against exploits, according to the company.

“One of the most significant updates is the use of compiler flags to help improve security by ‘hardening’ Fedora 23 Beta binaries against memory corruption vulnerabilities, buffer overflows and other similar issues,” Red Hat said in the Fedora 23 Beta release notes. “While not overt changes, these, and many other under-the-hood tweaks, will help to provide additional system security.”

Additional new features in Fedora 23 Beta include:

Red Hat reports no major updates to Fedora Cloud in the new beta release. It says Linux users should “stay tuned, however, for news about Fedora 23 Atomic Host“—a platform for containerization—”in the not too distant future!”

Fedora 23 Beta is available in three distinct flavors—Server, Workstation and Cloud—as part of the Fedora.next initiative that began in 2014. Each of the flavors is built on the same core code, but features separate application stacks tailored to different types of usage.