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Are the BSDs dying? Some security researchers think so (2018)

10 pointsby gilesgatealmost 6 years ago

4 comments

jillesvangurpalmost 6 years ago
There&#x27;s also this other BSD derivative out there called Mac OS: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;3446231&#x2F;how-closely-are-mac-os-x-and-bsd-related" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stackoverflow.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;3446231&#x2F;how-closely-are-...</a><p>Depending on your point of view this is or isn&#x27;t BSD. But either way it undeniably includes a lot of BSD variants of tools (like grep, sed, etc.) and BSD licensed code.<p>Other than that, I&#x27;ve not really encountered BSD in the wild, ever. I know some companies still use it. It&#x27;s just that I&#x27;ve never crossed paths with such companies in my career over the last two plus decades. I&#x27;ve encountered some companies sticking with Solaris for unclear reasons (pain in the ass to deal with these days) but that&#x27;s been a few years.<p>The &quot;it&#x27;s more secure&quot; argument seems to come up a lot and indeed is a strong value in the BSD community. However, you could legitimately wonder if this is more a case of security through obscurity than a technical reality these days. So few people use BSD these days that hacking it has got to be a pretty specialist skill for a wannabe hacker and probably not worth investing a lot of time in given the limited number of interesting targets. Not necessarily a bad thing if you want to keep hackers out but not exactly a user growth strategy either for any of the BSDs.
roryrjbalmost 6 years ago
The impression I got, and it&#x27;s only an impression based on various blog posts, articles and mailing lists over the years, is that OpenBSD is the most secure operating system even though it&#x27;s mostly programmed in C (and that they&#x27;re not looking to replace that with Rust, et al) with mitigations like W^X and pledge, etc; and the fact that their code base is the smallest. I mean I know this is a wide and complicated area with different classes of bugs and vulnerabilities, but still I thought it was generally accepted.
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lsofzzalmost 6 years ago
Nope. They are alive, well and kicking arse on multiple fronts.
aquabeaglealmost 6 years ago
(2018)
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