[nickpsecurity]

I'm glad you're saying it, too, as I get tired of this myth. I wrote a scheme on Schneier's blog for disproving it a while back. Basically, you counter the mitigations which look awfully similar to the one's that got countered in Linux and Windows. Once you have that, wait until a bug is mentioned on mailing list that can lead to memory attack. Weaponize it. Profit.

Leads me to what I claim is dirty secret behind "only 2 holes in..." claim they have: OpenBSD just fixes bugs they find without serious attempts to determine if they'd be exploitable vulnerabilities. They just do accounting differently than the rest. So, by their numbers, they only had 2 vulnerabilities because they didn't assess whether other bugs were vulnerabilities in the first place.

They have good code quality but they're full of shit about how vulnerable it is or isn't.

[ymse]

Note: they explicitly state "only two remote holes...", one of which can be found in this very thread.

Security problems are usually clearly marked in the changelog: http://www.openbsd.org/errata59.html

What really annoys me with OpenBSD is that users are expected to download the CVS source and compile it to fix problems rather than upgrade to a dot-release.

For a normal user that's fine, but if you have a bunch of servers you'll need a sophisticated build/deploy infrastructure to stay updated.

[nickpsecurity]

That means no Internet-facing service has ever had a bug of the sort that often becomes code-injection. Or they didn't test for exploitability in the case of mitigations being bypassed. Neither one makes the claim stand up as it has hidden implication of "only two remote holes for amateurs and people ignoring mitigations."

"What really annoys me with OpenBSD is that users are expected to download the CVS source and compile it to fix problems rather than upgrade to a dot-release."

Yeah, that sounds like it could be annoying. They should have both options available given they already have to trust OpenBSD team to not backdoor their stuff.

[xorcist]

"Only two remote holes in the base install". That's because the base install contains very little in terms of remotely accessible services (only OpenSSH I believe?).