Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rasengan 2549 days ago
> Update: The core dumps are due to buggy programs. OpenBSD malloc is not as forgiving to blatant programming errors as other implementations of malloc available on other Operating Systems.

What is the difference/error?

1 comments

OpenBSD's malloc is much more strict for security reasons. A crash sucks, but it's infinitely preferable to an undetected bug that leaks data.

Heartbleed was famously possible even when using OpenSSL on OpenBSD because OpenSSL (if I understand right) used its own custom allocator instead of the system malloc, thus bypassing the various attack mitigations OpenBSD's malloc provides (and that would have prevented Heartbleed from affecting OpenBSD systems). This (among other instances of similar behavior) is what prompted the OpenBSD folks to fork OpenSSL into libressl.