I sense increasingly shrill sounds emanating from the OpenBSD camp. Monday: Theo De Raadt, complaining about FreeBSD security, after giving commit access to NS

I sense increasingly shrill sounds emanating from the OpenBSD camp. Monday: Theo De Raadt, complaining about FreeBSD security, after giving commit access to NSA/FBI contractors to install backdoors in OpenBSD back in 2003. http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/62641-crypto-freebsd-playing-catch-up-says-de-raadt http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/open-source/62641-cry... Pull quote: — "Now we all discover that FreeBSD has been doing it wrong. It's not as if they operate in a closed source world, and couldn't have looked at what others did. They must have chosen a few years ago to do this wrong, intentionally. "Perhaps that decision was made by their Californian developers, the ones who work fairly close to that NSA building. — And his presentation from ruBSD 2013 last week (http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/ http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/) http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ru13-deraadt/ http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ru13-deraadt/ In which our friend Theo de Raadt talks about measures in OpenBSD that make attackers life harder: memory allocation randomization, W^X pages and stack protectors. Of course it’s served with a side dish of invective at FreeBSD, as the project does not use all his cool stuff, and how could it then claim to be called a secure system, hmm? Dear Theo, Playing the game called 'guess my memory address' with attackers might be fun, but better to actually isolate them via cap_enter(2), and guarantee success rather than attempting to make a successful attack less probable. Security isn't a game. Your friend, FreeBSD After Theo came Henning Brauer speaking about OpenBSD’s variant of pf. Seems they have made yet another syntax change recently, and that pf performance is up, (but no numbers were reported). Since Gleb (who re-engineered pf to be multi-threaded for FreeBSD 10) had presented earlier in the day, with actual results: http://image.slidesharecdn.com/rubsdsmirnov-131214051554-phpapp01/95/slide-61-1024.jpg?cb=1387019979 http://image.slidesharecdn.com/rubsdsmirnov-131214051554-php... Henning was, of course, queried. Gleb reports that Henning responded, "'in FreeBSD pf is faster than in OpenBSD' is actually a lie, and that if you pick a proper uniprocessor hardware you will see, that in OpenBSD pf can forward 3 times more than in FreeBSD." Unfortunately, he didn't give any hint on the model of hardware he used to generate this result, so reproducing his results becomes… difficult. Then yesterday we get the tight-lipped email from asking for someone to pay the power bill for OpenBSD. I hope he doesn’t get someone in trouble for the obvious tax dodge. Someone else pointed out the rack pic from 2009. Note Theo standing in-front of the same rack in the itwire piece above, and the same photo is used in his speaker page for ruBSD (http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/talks/1487/ http://tech.yandex.ru/events/yagosti/ruBSD/talks/1487/). So I doubt it's changed much in the past 5 years.