Re: DARPA and the network

[Henning Brauer <hb-nanog () bsws de>]

* Florian Weimer <fw () deneb enyo de> [2005-09-06 11:44]:
> * Henning Brauer:
> > so if the BSDs are en par with preventive measures, why is OpenBSD (to 
> > my knowledge) the only one shipping ProPolice, which prevented 
> > basically any buffer overflow seen in the wild for some time now?
> > Why is OpenBSD the only one to have randomized library loading, 
> > rendering basicaly all exploits with fixed offsets unuseable?
> > Why is OpenBSD the only one to have W^X, keeping memory pages writeable 
> > _or_ executable, but not both, unless an application fixes us to (by 
> > respective mprotect calls)?
> All these pamper over the real problems and are not very helpful in a
> service provider environment, where availability might well be more
> important than integrity.  Buffer overflows still lead to crashes.

oh, so turning a remote root into an application crash is something I 
value quite a bit. this is propolice and w^x, mostly.

you skipped all the other stuff I listed that we do.

> Some of the countermeasures also break lots of legitimate applications
> (Lisp implementations, for example, or precompiled headers for GCC).

clisp is the only thing I am aware of that got broken.
even emancs works, and those who know how emacs works can value that :)

> (Isn't this quite off-topic for NANOG?)

yes, it is. we can further dicuss that in private if you wish; however, 
claiming OpenBSD is just more vocal about security is just far off 
reality, and that had to be put in perspective.

-- 
Henning Brauer, hb () bsws de, henning () openbsd org
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