4 ms·

I agree that this is much worse than a crash if you care about your keys, and I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. My point is that -CURRENT may be rather unst

• drostie 12y ago
  There's a point that's even more germane: if you take the money and dev time that would be required to build an exploit to hose your system, you could probably for a comparable sum pay your programmers to obfuscate a new zero-day vulnerability into the FreeBSD kernel on the premise that it's an experimental feature. In that regard the 'crashability' of the branch is indeed more significant than a random-numbers exploit: the crashability of the branch is a mnemonic for its general permissiveness towards unaudited (or not-sufficiently-audited) code. When you remember that your adversaries can inject code into the OS, that changes your threat modeling.
  • tedunangst 12y ago
    Huh? "This crashes, therefore I bet it has backdoors." Does anybody really think like that? What happens when the crashes get fixed and the not crashing backdoor turns into -release?
    • drostie 12y ago
      It makes sense if you look at it as a correlation, not as causation. The point is that one cause (less review of experimental kernel features), which is known to underlie the "this crashes" problem, can also potentially cause the "it could have back-doors" problem. Of course, as you say, not-crashing back-doors can make it into releases, too. Open source's generic promise that more eyes will make bugs shallow is not a guarantee.