One bug found is a testament to the great diligence and culture around security of OpenBSD. Especially if you take into account the amount of resources they have been able to achieve this with.
It is also a testament to solid engineering and attention to good security practices in general. These still work, also against fancy new AI attackers.
When sophisticated attacks become cheaper to run, maybe it will (finally) be cheaper to do more solid engineering instead of doing it quick and dirty and ending up in indefinite bug-squashing mode.
I suspect the easier option is to use AI to review your own code. The arms race between developers and attackers might even make some of the AI valuations come true.
That does not match my experience with obsd. It is not so much minimalism as they are not afraid to reinvent the wheel. A obsd install is full of services, more than most linux installs I have seen.
For example you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered what a pain in the ass it is to get a pflow producer working on linux after doing the first one on openbsd.
And as a counter example here you have openbsd "we are going to install a bgp daemon on every single device, because you never know when you may need one"
I am not complaining, I like the feeling that I could single handedly rebuild the internet using only what is found in an openbsd base install. But wow, considering the size there is a lot in there. They definitely punch above their weight.
It's not a counter example to give examples of what does exist.
And it's not like the BGP daemon is on by default. That'd be dumb. You could equally say that any Ubuntu system has equally many steps to turn on a BGP daemon, starting with `apt install frr`.
I sure hope openbsd's BGPd doesn't have any suid binaries. And if it doesn't, well that might just as well be a vacation photo instead of a binary for all the "code" it is.
I agree that they're punching above their weight, but I would also say that they are falling more and more behind. 25 years ago they were more at par in what use cases they can address, and its performance. But now it's almost retro computing.
And it's fine! If you really only need a bog standard webserver, or router/firewall, then that's the use case and it solves your problem. And solves the problem without baggage.
I wouldn't use it for storage, though, since running a non-checksumming filesystem nowadays is a bit of a joke. (let's not get into btrfs. I acknowledge its history, but checksumming is not backups, and backups address the historical btrfs problems while not addressing at all the checksumming)
But Bluetooth is basically a giant blast of security vulnerabilities. On the consumer side, yes, it's a big subsystem to drop, but on the server side, it's a little bit different!
I'm not an OpenBSD expert, but seems like you should be able to pass BT through USB and then do that in a subsystem or an isolated environment like a VM.
> But Bluetooth is basically a giant blast of security vulnerabilities
Yes, but this is exactly the point. And running OpenBSD is not a problem, until you run into a brick wall like this.
If you don't need it (and things like it), then that's all fine. As with everything, the last 10% takes 99% of the work, and code, and therefore contains about 99% of the security problems.
IIRC they were also very late to being able to run virtual machines, and even USB.
If you simply don't implement the things you don't need for a use case (e.g. a webserver) then that scales down to the fact that the compressor controller chip in your (dumb) fridge is not remotely exploitable too.
The Bluetooth spec is horrendous, and from what I read, the hardware is equally horrifying. Bluettoth is a wireless bus, not one class a device and an implementation would need to provide hooks to the other subsystems like wscons (keyboard and mouse), audio and network. OpenBSD does not have kernel modules, so it’s either in or not.
The Bluetooth Classic spec is indeed fairly awful, but the Bluetooth LE spec is not too bad. Plus, the entire specification is available free-of-charge, without even needing to register an account.
Bluetooth LE used to be limited to tiny accessories, but these days it supports nearly everything—I've completely disabled Bluetooth Classic on my (Linux) laptop because of how much of a disaster it is, but I'm still able to use my mouse and headphones over LE only.
> OpenBSD does not have kernel modules, so it’s either in or not.
But I'm assuming that not all kernel code is active at all times? Because it would seem odd to me if the amdgpu code was always active on something like a Raspberry Pi.
You're right, but of course OpenBSD does far more than 20%.
One thing I actually really like about OpenBSD is that things either work or they don't. There's no "Well it kind of works if you have this specific hardware set up and these programs running..." It just works 100% of the time, in 100% of the ways you expect, or it doesn't.
If they can provide only 20% of the functionality and only 1% of the bugs, that's a compelling trade-off for many use-cases! (and a bit closer to the reality IMHO)
I ran it diskless for years with read-only NFS mounts. Set up syslog and a pflog daemon to send logs elsewhere, and you don't need write access most of the time.
I believe that while the file system does not have journaling, that can be offset by applications. I.e. I think the SQLite Write Ahead Log would still protect you against data loss even if there's no journal in the file system, assuming you set various settings correctly. So I think it kinda depends on how the applications store data.
OpenBSD's FFS can be told to be fully synchronous, making it about as robust as can be for not being journaled. If you lose power it will lose the specific data currently being written to disk. It won't lose other data, because it doesn't keep a bunch of it sitting around in a RAM cache while lying to the writing process about the I/O op already being completed. A journaled file system, too, will lose in-flight data that has yet to land on disk if the power is cut.
I've had my share of sudden power cuts hit OpenBSD during the 20+ years I've been using it, and I have yet to ever see its file system actually go corrupt.
A sincere question: what important data does your router frequently and busily need to persist? If you don't have a UPS for it, perhaps it isn't too important after all. Maybe we have different perspectives of what a router is and should be. I manage a router (with OpenBSD) and it can drop off the power grid at any moment without losing anything of importance. If your router is in fact a multi-functional server I can understand the notion. Consider making all of the file systems fully synchronous. It has worked great for me for two decades.
Exactly, the entire AI industry has been trying to create an AI powered security arm race. I am not necessarily blaming them.
Hard to know how much has been thrown into this but I would bet a lot.
So far I have been very surprised we haven't been flooded by those type of announcements. If you look you will always find something and OpenBSD is the top price.
They are throwing tokens at codebases and finding mostly vulnerabilities in cases that have not been worth the limited time and effort of the chronically underfunded and understaffed professional groups. There’d be a lot more value in the companies giving the money they spend on their synthetic text extruders to the organizations doing quality security research work.
The point of the comment you are replying to is that it's also not worth the time and effort to use LLMs to find vulnerabilities, if "time and effort" can be measured with "money". If you factor in all the money spent on training, GPU data centers etc, it's not actually a financially efficient way to find bugs unless you profit from creating demand for LLMs. LLMs aren't cheaper than humans per unit work, yet. They're just massively deficit funded because capital thinks "AI" is going to reshape the world order, and wants in.
>you can't really criticise an AI lab for doing AI instead of straight up giving money to security researchers
Sure I can, if they - or you - pretend "the entire point" is about useful security work rather than expensive loss-leading marketing and demand creation.
We shouldn't look at this and think "wow AI is super useful for security". We should look and this and think "wow, there's a LOT of capital going into persuading us that AI is super useful for security".
I don't think that's true? It runs most services as their own separate users, with pledge+unveil to limit what they can access even more. That's very much depth.
It is true. The do surface level protections, but have nothing to really lock down a system. What do they provide that can restrict an attacker who managed to compromise a remote service that wasn't using pledge or unveil? On other OS's, you can set things like append only, limit files being readable by particular processes, whitelist paths or executables from where the system may execute, etc etc etc.
yes, most company settings don't run untrusted code, and OpenBSD is mostly used for servers not employee devices
but that doesn't mean LPEs aren't quite relevant, because they matter for pretty much everyone if combined with other vulnerabilities, like RCE, supply chain attack etc.
and while RCE are becoming less common, supply chain attacks have been increasingly more common
It is also a testament to solid engineering and attention to good security practices in general. These still work, also against fancy new AI attackers.
When sophisticated attacks become cheaper to run, maybe it will (finally) be cheaper to do more solid engineering instead of doing it quick and dirty and ending up in indefinite bug-squashing mode.