Big Fish: Exploiting a 37-Year-Old Kernel Bug in OpenBSD (calif.io)
149 points by rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 7 hours ago
bch 6 hours ago
Props for the OpenBSD Release -style graphics. Looking forward to the theme song.
phendrenad2 7 hours ago
Interestingly, looks like this was accidentally fixed in NetBSD during a rewrite of that code in August of 1999.
iberator an hour ago
NetBsd os the King. Most portable operating system (not just kernel) on the Planet.
All back to 1978 VAX/780 - still working from single base sources as x86 or ARM
ozereray1 7 hours ago
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?
waz0wski 6 hours ago
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
socializer 6 hours ago
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.
raddan 5 hours ago
sippingabonedry 6 hours ago
It's not as heavily audited as you think. They have like a dozen active developers.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago
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.
hnlmorg 4 hours ago
thomashabets2 6 hours ago
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
sedan_baklazhan 2 hours ago
I looked for bugs in Linux coreutils on a Russian Elbrus PC.
It has a very interesting protected mode of operation where every memory pointer is tagged.
So, I just ran tests and quickly found a number of memory-related bugs.
I’ve submitted some patches, but they were never accepted. These tools’ maintainers seemed very inertial to me. So maybe this is why many (low importance, I assume) issues persists there for a long time.
zoeysmithe 5 hours ago
I feel like this is the elephant in the room. People keep acting surprised these large codebases are full of bugs and exploits. C isn't a safe language and moving to safe languages is going to be the only lasting solution.
uecker 4 hours ago
stackghost 6 hours ago
>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.
socializer 5 hours ago
> 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.
stackghost 3 hours ago
mschuster91 4 hours ago
SoftTalker 5 hours ago
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.
raddan 5 hours ago
e12e 4 hours ago
sippingabonedry 5 hours ago
throwaway7356 5 hours ago
stackghost 3 hours ago
Hikikomori 5 hours ago
Cisco runs mostly Linux. Juniper uses freebsd and Linux.
stackghost 3 hours ago
anthk 5 hours ago
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.
zoeysmithe 5 hours ago
I think there's this cultural bias about the 'boy genius open source coder' that of course isn't true at all. Open source code is at the same quality as corporate written closed source code, in general. There have been studies on this and open vs closed source code isn't very different in terms of defects and exploits.
The problem is the people most willing to buy into this cargo cult mentality are techies, so tech forums are the last place to really have this conversation based on facts. Hence why your comment is barely visible here due to its low karma.
jms703 6 hours ago
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.
shevy-java 5 hours ago
Poor OpenBSD guys. Now they have to acknowledge THREE exploits (in total) on their homepage.
e12e 4 hours ago
> Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!
This isn't remote (and I don't think the only local in recent times) - so, no - they won't have to update.
ewy1 2 hours ago
the ai-generated graphic before any content is presented is kind of a turnoff