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There's a factor with OpenBSD that isn't mentioned here at all: it has very few developers. A single developer can hold much or all of the state and important

by api 7y ago

There's a factor with OpenBSD that isn't mentioned here at all: it has very few developers. A single developer can hold much or all of the state and important security considerations in their head. A small team can communicate well and can hold to a single style, and members of a small team can ask each other things easily. Single developers or small teams can write secure code in unsafe languages. The problem is that this doesn't scale. Add a large number of developers and it becomes increasingly difficult to police security in an unsafe language. Safe languages, unit tests, and fuzzing help a lot more here by making large classes of errors difficult or impossible to manifest or catching them automatically. Linux is a bit special here: it has a lot of developers but a small number who are responsible for approving things, and it's so massively important and popular that it has a lot of eyeballs on it and gets a lot of automated testing. Security issues still creep in though.

pjmlp 7y ago
Creep it enough, that Google created the Kernel Self Protection Project. https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Project https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Pr... One of their first activities was to clean the kernel from all usage of C's VLA.
chasil 7y ago
You might claim that the security design of OpenBSD does not scale, and the observations of the parent article do cast some reasonable doubt on code security. However, a number of projects from OpenBSD have been widely adopted and are successful in their own right, for example: C:\>ssh -V OpenSSH_for_Windows_7.6p1, LibreSSL 2.6.4 The two projects above, OpenSSH and LibreSSL, have been even more strongly adopted by Apple, as I understand it. OpenSSH is adopted by just about everybody. Google Android's "bionic" C library is also based on OpenBSD, and I would imagine that the coding concerns for libc will trickle down. OpenBSD is not the sum of its parts, as so much of it is used in other environments.
- loeg 7y ago
  Bionic took pieces from OpenBSD, as well as other places[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)#Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)#Components

by api 7y ago

pjmlp 7y ago

Creep it enough, that Google created the Kernel Self Protection Project. https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Project https://kernsec.org/wiki/index.php/Kernel_Self_Protection_Pr... One of their first activities was to clean the kernel from all usage of C's VLA.

chasil 7y ago

You might claim that the security design of OpenBSD does not scale, and the observations of the parent article do cast some reasonable doubt on code security. However, a number of projects from OpenBSD have been widely adopted and are successful in their own right, for example: C:\>ssh -V OpenSSH_for_Windows_7.6p1, LibreSSL 2.6.4 The two projects above, OpenSSH and LibreSSL, have been even more strongly adopted by Apple, as I understand it. OpenSSH is adopted by just about everybody. Google Android's "bionic" C library is also based on OpenBSD, and I would imagine that the coding concerns for libc will trickle down. OpenBSD is not the sum of its parts, as so much of it is used in other environments.

loeg 7y ago
Bionic took pieces from OpenBSD, as well as other places[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)#Components https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bionic_(software)#Components