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.
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.
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.
They only audit the kernel and base userland. Ports are subject to far less scrutiny.
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
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
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.