4 ms·

Who has a better track record?

• tptacek 7y ago
  The problem is that it isn't a track record. What's funny about it is, if you're going to make up a benchmark (and theirs is contrived; it was "no remote vulnerabilities", as I recall, when I was involved with the project, then "no remote vulnerabilities in the default install", then "only one remote vulnerability in the default install"), make up one where your number is zero, not "just 2 in a heck of a long time". But more substantively: the reason you run an operating system is to do stuff on it. It isn't 1996 any more and nobody gets public shell accounts on Linux systems or OpenBSD systems; similarly, remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in other operating systems are also exceedingly rare, and so OpenBSD's benchmark excludes the LPEs that actually make up the meaningful attack surface of a modern OS. What's a more important question is what features the operating system provides to harden the non-default programs that inevitably have to run on it. OpenBSD has historically lagged here, though they're upping their game recently. Despite briefly being involved with the project during "The OpenBSD Security Audit" in the late 1990s, I have a longstanding bias against OpenBSD that I should be up front with: we shipped an appliance on OpenBSD at Arbor Networks, and I spent several days debugging a VMM problem that would zombify pages of memory and gradually suffocate our systems. When I presented evidence to Theo, he said (not a literal quote) "don't bother me about this, Chuck Cranor" --- I think it's Chuck Cranor but could be wrong --- "wrote this VMM as his graduate project and I've got nothing to do with it". For whatever that's worth, I've felt OpenBSD is an unserious option for deploying real systems other than near-stateless network middleboxes ever since.