It’s remarkable that a bug survived 37 years in one of the most heavily audited codebases, which shows how hard some kernel bugs are to catch by review alone. Do you think fuzzing or static analysis could realistically have found this class of bug, or did it need a human thinking about the exploit primitive?
Every blog post on this site is AI generated and covers bugs and exploits that were uncovered also by AI
So, sort of like fuzzing. There's a scary amount of exploitable stuff like this sitting in every BSD and Linux system out there, including every embedded system running old kernels in routers, cars, plcs, on and on
They clearly have some AI-generated write-ups, which I guess is fine for utilitarian stuff like that, but the post in question appears to be entirely human.
If it is, it's not very good. They provide the source for the exploit, great, but the explanation of the exploit is terrible: just seven pithy bullet points. It's not really clear what's going on without a lot more digging. The discussion of mitigations is better, though.
Context: I teach a college-level security class where undergrads do stack-smashing-like attacks (and every year a handful of talented students manage to pull off things like ROP attacks, analysis of entropy for a layout randomizers, or side-channel attacks). All of their writeups are much better than this one.
Heavily audited might be a stretch. Who did the audit and what knew to look for is key. I wonder if they are using agentic tools to help improve the frequency and quality of their audits. Volunteer time is precious and getting robots to help might be useful, but I can also see it taking more of that same volunteer time to get good results from the robots. Either way, its their project and and they'll do as they deem fit, which is totally fine.
Not that remarkable. Nobody in history has been able to write correct C code, and that includes OpenBSD developers.
I pointed an AI at the smallest two tools in OpenBSD I could think of, cat and find, and found multiple bugs. One of which was a buffer overflow (albeit unlikely to be exploitable). IIRC these bugs had existed since at least the NetBSD/OpenBSD split.
The idea of "OpenBSD is super duper secure" is mostly a fiction. Their prime claim to fame, "only two remote holes in the default install in a squillion years", is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything, so as soon as you install packages to make the system useful you're beyond their security claims.
Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Red network routers? They're Cisco, Juniper, PAN, etc. It's all COTS stuff. OpenBSD is mostly a LARP.
> is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything
Which is a good thing. An important thing. The reason you're stuck in a perpetual update cycle for most Linux distros and for Windows is that they ship with an insane number of things that most users have no need for. Yeah, every laptop definitely needs NetBIOS and iSCSI and UPnP turned on by default.
It's true that everything you add on top of the OpenBSD baseline increases your attack surface, but it's a saner approach than shipping with a gigantic attack surface and then forcing you to know about and disable the things you don't need.
> Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Which is almost certainly a combination of the complexities of govt IT procurement, the needs of non-technical users who may only be familiar with Windows & MS Office, and the enterprise management features of Windows that aren't as good in most other OSes.
The base install includes a firewall, http server, load-balancer/proxy, ldap server, caching DNS resolver, ssh server, nfs server, dhcp server, smtp server, bgp routing daemon, virtual machine subsystem, and a lot of other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
Yes, but with the exception of sshd (which you get asked about during install), none of these things (NONE!!!) is enabled by default.
I am probably misremembering, but the OpenBSD documentation used to even explain how to disable inetd if you were too paranoid to use that. It is now disabled by default, and--I just checked one of my running systems--my machine does not even have an /etc/inetd.conf file. Most of the things running on a default install are init, cron, slaacd, a handful of gettys, ntpd, syslogd, and sndoid. Arguably sndiod is the only thing you could really remove from that list.
It doesn't matter as they are not enabled by default.
So even if they allow unauthenticated code execution as root or kernel by default when started, it would not count for the "remote hole in default install" claim.
You could as well just not enable network by default. Which makes Windows 95 safer than OpenBSD.
OpenBSD was used under NDA's in some really sensitive corpos with Gnome2 setups and some RDP/Citrix clients and even Perl?+GTK2 wireless graphical assisatnt.
If OpenBSD had a stable GeFS setup as a filesystem -still WIP- (and toad/hotplugd for external FS' mounting) it could get customers in no time, because today except for CUDA the rest can virtually work 100% the same as any Linux distro.
Props for the OpenBSD Release -style graphics. Looking forward to the theme song.
Interestingly, looks like this was accidentally fixed in NetBSD during a rewrite of that code in August of 1999.
It’s remarkable that a bug survived 37 years in one of the most heavily audited codebases, which shows how hard some kernel bugs are to catch by review alone. Do you think fuzzing or static analysis could realistically have found this class of bug, or did it need a human thinking about the exploit primitive?
Every blog post on this site is AI generated and covers bugs and exploits that were uncovered also by AI
So, sort of like fuzzing. There's a scary amount of exploitable stuff like this sitting in every BSD and Linux system out there, including every embedded system running old kernels in routers, cars, plcs, on and on
They clearly have some AI-generated write-ups, which I guess is fine for utilitarian stuff like that, but the post in question appears to be entirely human.
If it is, it's not very good. They provide the source for the exploit, great, but the explanation of the exploit is terrible: just seven pithy bullet points. It's not really clear what's going on without a lot more digging. The discussion of mitigations is better, though.
Context: I teach a college-level security class where undergrads do stack-smashing-like attacks (and every year a handful of talented students manage to pull off things like ROP attacks, analysis of entropy for a layout randomizers, or side-channel attacks). All of their writeups are much better than this one.
It's not as heavily audited as you think. They have like a dozen active developers.
How many developers do you need (and trust) to review patches?
They only audit the kernel and base userland. Ports are subject to far less scrutiny.
Heavily audited might be a stretch. Who did the audit and what knew to look for is key. I wonder if they are using agentic tools to help improve the frequency and quality of their audits. Volunteer time is precious and getting robots to help might be useful, but I can also see it taking more of that same volunteer time to get good results from the robots. Either way, its their project and and they'll do as they deem fit, which is totally fine.
Not that remarkable. Nobody in history has been able to write correct C code, and that includes OpenBSD developers.
I pointed an AI at the smallest two tools in OpenBSD I could think of, cat and find, and found multiple bugs. One of which was a buffer overflow (albeit unlikely to be exploitable). IIRC these bugs had existed since at least the NetBSD/OpenBSD split.
Everything in C is UB: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48203698
>in one of the most heavily audited codebases
The idea of "OpenBSD is super duper secure" is mostly a fiction. Their prime claim to fame, "only two remote holes in the default install in a squillion years", is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything, so as soon as you install packages to make the system useful you're beyond their security claims.
Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Red network routers? They're Cisco, Juniper, PAN, etc. It's all COTS stuff. OpenBSD is mostly a LARP.
> is pretty meaningless because the default install doesn't really do anything
Which is a good thing. An important thing. The reason you're stuck in a perpetual update cycle for most Linux distros and for Windows is that they ship with an insane number of things that most users have no need for. Yeah, every laptop definitely needs NetBIOS and iSCSI and UPnP turned on by default.
It's true that everything you add on top of the OpenBSD baseline increases your attack surface, but it's a saner approach than shipping with a gigantic attack surface and then forcing you to know about and disable the things you don't need.
> Classified workstations in National Security contexts? They run Windows.
Which is almost certainly a combination of the complexities of govt IT procurement, the needs of non-technical users who may only be familiar with Windows & MS Office, and the enterprise management features of Windows that aren't as good in most other OSes.
The base install includes a firewall, http server, load-balancer/proxy, ldap server, caching DNS resolver, ssh server, nfs server, dhcp server, smtp server, bgp routing daemon, virtual machine subsystem, and a lot of other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
Yes, but with the exception of sshd (which you get asked about during install), none of these things (NONE!!!) is enabled by default.
I am probably misremembering, but the OpenBSD documentation used to even explain how to disable inetd if you were too paranoid to use that. It is now disabled by default, and--I just checked one of my running systems--my machine does not even have an /etc/inetd.conf file. Most of the things running on a default install are init, cron, slaacd, a handful of gettys, ntpd, syslogd, and sndoid. Arguably sndiod is the only thing you could really remove from that list.
You're forgetting their SMTP server had a remote root RCE a few years ago, their IPSec server an authentication bypass, etc.
Both of these were logic bugs and not "insecure C code".
It doesn't matter as they are not enabled by default.
So even if they allow unauthenticated code execution as root or kernel by default when started, it would not count for the "remote hole in default install" claim.
You could as well just not enable network by default. Which makes Windows 95 safer than OpenBSD.
OpenBSD was used under NDA's in some really sensitive corpos with Gnome2 setups and some RDP/Citrix clients and even Perl?+GTK2 wireless graphical assisatnt.
https://www.mtier.org/solutions/consulting/
If OpenBSD had a stable GeFS setup as a filesystem -still WIP- (and toad/hotplugd for external FS' mounting) it could get customers in no time, because today except for CUDA the rest can virtually work 100% the same as any Linux distro.
Cisco runs mostly Linux. Juniper uses freebsd and Linux.
Poor OpenBSD guys. Now they have to acknowledge THREE exploits (in total) on their homepage.