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Conversely, the well-audited OpenBSD kernel has had next to none of these problems precisely because they pay attention to correctness, even with the "fatigued
by Sanddancer 12y ago
Conversely, the well-audited OpenBSD kernel has had next to none of these problems precisely because they pay attention to correctness, even with the "fatigued and rusty scrap iron" that is the C language.
- PhantomGremlin 12y agoI'm sure that OpenBSD is much more secure in general than Linux. I love it and use it as my own firewall. But even OpenBSD has had its share of local root exploits. They've even had 2 remote root exploits, and so few only because most services are disabled by default.
- Sanddancer 12y agoTrue. However, they also as a group have done some pretty significant research into problems declared solved in order to make systems more secure. For example, the change a few years back to make malloc based on mmap instead of more traditional heap pools, so that if there is an overflow, the program's much more likely to segfault than to go gleefully trampling over data, etc. Additionally, it's worth keeping in mind that the reason for the OpenBSD team forking OpenSSL wasn't Heartbleed, but rather the OpenSSL team's rather terribly coded malloc replacement that did things in there. All of the security research and practices the OpenBSD team typically insists upon couldn't do anything because OpenSSL insisted on running in its own leaky memory box.