A FreeBSD machine running as a firewall might make sense without significantly increasing attack surface. But inviting a new hardware product into your infra is

A FreeBSD machine running as a firewall might make sense without significantly increasing attack surface. But inviting a new hardware product into your infra is a significant increase in attack surface. SolarWinds is a very fresh example of a catastrophic supply chain attack and a clear example why it might not be a defense in depth thing. If your network is secure, and a well configured machine only listening on port 22 is pretty secure, you have to ask how the production machine will interact with the outside world. Well every update is an inverse remote code execution. You are getting remote code from an external location and then running it directly in production. So while you might trust FreeBSDs package manager, do you trust Cisco? Do you trust SolarWinds? Even if you do, it's hard to argue that your attack surface hasn't been increased.