DARPA and the network

Henning Brauer hb-nanog at bsws.de
Tue Sep 6 09:35:22 UTC 2005


* Todd Vierling <tv at duh.org> [2005-08-05 00:26]:
> I'm one of the developers for NetBSD.  From what I can see, on average, all
> the BSDs are about the same when it comes to addressing vulnerabilities.
> They're almost on par when it comes to preventative measures (but remember,
> some preventative measures can go too far:  OpenBSD has fallen victim to
> that more than once).  The real end-of-the-day tangible difference wrt
> security is how vocal the project's security team is.

so if the BSDs are en par with preventive measures, why is OpenBSD (to 
my knowledge) the only one shipping ProPolice, which prevented 
basically any buffer overflow seen in the wild for some time now?
Why is OpenBSD the only one to have randomized library loading, 
rendering basicaly all exploits with fixed offsets unuseable?
Why is OpenBSD the only one to have W^X, keeping memory pages writeable 
_or_ executable, but not both, unless an application fixes us to (by 
respective mprotect calls)?
Where's the non-root, chrooted httpd, dhcpd, mopd, rbootd, afs, pppd etc 
on the other BSDs? The privilege seperated tcpdump? This list is not 
even remotely complete...
And, why's OpenBSd the only one that has systematically removed all 
uses of dangerous string handling functions like strcpy, strcat, 
sprintf etc?

so, claiming the difference is how vocal a project is is, in this case, 
just far off reality.

-- 
Henning Brauer, hb at bsws.de, henning at openbsd.org
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