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by JCattheATM 37 days ago
It really is true. OpenBSD focuses on auditing. In many cases they were not affected because of mitigations, but because they were just using a different stack. OpenBSD wasn't affected by regreSSHion for example, for basically the same reason Alpine wasn't.

OpenBSD didn't invent the concept behind W^X, and if you want to talk of 'copying', which I think is kind of silly personally, then PAX was first.

I'm familiar with the list of OpenBSD innovations, and in turn I would point you to https://https://isopenbsdsecu.re/ for a breakdown of their claims and marketing.

To this date OpenBSD doesn't have anything as simple as a proper ACL, let alone any type of MAC. They claim such systems are too complex, which is of course nonsense.

It's like I said - they focus a lot on preventing an attacker gaining access, but have little available to constrain attackers who DO get access.
1 comments
binkHN 37 days ago
> OpenBSD focuses on auditing.

This is partially true; there are numerous other things that are done for mitigation outside of this.

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JCattheATM 37 days ago
> there are numerous other things that are done for mitigation outside of this.

Sure, and I think they are mostly great, main problem being they just don't go far enough. Where's the namespace level isolation, ACL or MAC support? Is there a way to give a user append only ability for one file, while having write but not delete access to another, and delete to yet another? What's the maximum extent to which OpenBSD could have limited an attacker, had they been vulnerable to regreSSHion?

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anthk 37 days ago
Namespaces are a joke under Linux compared ot 9front. The last exploits under bubblewrap ran the same. OpenBSD has OpenSSH pledge'd and unveil'ed.
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JCattheATM 37 days ago
Don't make the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because they didn't stop escape via dirtyfrag doesn't make them useless let alone a joke. pledge and unveil are nice, but exactly how effective do you expect them to be against an ssh/sftp server? Maybe you have ssh configured so it can't manipulate user and/or system files, but that isn't typically common usage.
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