Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style

Posted Jul 22, 2015 17:17 UTC (Wed) by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
In reply to: Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style by spender
Parent article: Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style

So I've got to ask Brad, you hate OBSD security, you hate Linux security (which is fair), what system do you use? A heavily locked down PAX / grsecurity enabled Linux distro? As much as I see you pull the rug out from under so many of these security features, generally in Linux, I'm curious what you would consider to be "secure".

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Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style

Posted Jul 22, 2015 17:39 UTC (Wed) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (3 responses)

Don't know what he's using now but at the time of this LinuxFR interview (http://linuxfr.org/nodes/24807/comments/1052695) he said :

I know this will probably upset some of your readers, but I actually
am running Windows 7 RC right now. Prior to that I had been running
Windows Vista. I haven't used Linux as a primary desktop since college
or so.

Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style

Posted Jul 22, 2015 18:05 UTC (Wed) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link] (2 responses)

i'll see that interview and raise you https://microsoft.com/emet ;).

Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style

Posted Jul 22, 2015 18:26 UTC (Wed) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

OK I fold :-)

Domesticating applications, OpenBSD style

Posted Jul 26, 2015 19:47 UTC (Sun) by ploxiln (subscriber, #58395) [Link]

Wow... so Brad cares 100% about security features and 0% about software quality... he cares so much about security (features, apparently) that he uses WINDOWS!

Just to state the obvious, MS / Windows had most "mitigation" features first, like ASLR and sandboxing, but it was just checkbox features to use for sales purposes, and didn't fix their security problems. There's always the most widely used software on the platform not opting into the security feature or opting out of it, like flash plugin having a root-level helper service to get it out of the browser sandbox, or acrobat reader not opting into ASLR (and running javascript and such), or Office's VB macros and OLE hilariousness, or font kerning scripts running in the kernel. And to top it all off it's all closed source so there's no telling how much ridiculous crap is in there, and no one but Microsoft can do anything about it. Exploits for Windows continue to appear regularly in the wild, despite the industry-leading mitigation features.

Brad has good ideas, and does a lot of work to create working exploits, but has always come off as rather unbalanced in how he values different qualities of software, and wow does this confirm it. Wow.