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Theo De Raadt Says FreeBSD Is Just Catching Up On Security
An anonymous reader writes "The OpenBSD project has no reason to follow the steps taken by FreeBSD with regard to hardware-based cryptography because it has already been doing this for a decade, according to Theo de Raadt. 'FreeBSD has caught up to what OpenBSD has been doing for over 10 years,' the OpenBSD founder told iTWire. 'I see nothing new in their changes. Basically, it is 10 years of FreeBSD stupidity. They don't know a thing about security. They even ignore relevant research in all fields, not just from us, but from everyone.'"
...only OpenBSD would catch up in every OTHER category...
Good old Theo De Raadt.
Half human, half cunt.
"De Raadt has been criticized for having a somewhat abrasive personality..."
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
As usual:
- Theo is a complete asshole, but also quite correct about most things. OpenBSD is rather behind the
times in general, but very good at what it does do. And their stance on BSD license and making BSD tools is great.
- FreeBSD really is stupid about some things.
Let's take for instance their complete refusal to implement any strong security in their distribution chain.
You can't verify their ISO's or packages back to their source in any way. Their repo is ancient svn, not
git or monotone, so they have no signable hashes in their repos. There's no deterministic builds. etc.
And when you bring it up, they just handwave about process and workflow as reasons to continue
doing the same. FreeBSD is pretty damn good as an OS, but their standing on these things is BULLSHIT.
to write your ipsec, thats the definition of security.
Exactly.
The NSA is the one you are protecting yourself against . Why would you EVER trust any cryptographic primitives designed by them at all?
Being able to fully trust the cryptographic primitives on a system is not a new thing though... those NSA guys have tainted so much everywhere simply because it is their job description to decrypt sensitive communications for the intelligence community.
Microsoft anyone?
...Why should I care? Where in the world is serious stuff being done on any of these platforms? Just asking...
When it comes to security, De Raadt is like House
So I guess it matters if you care about security. Then again, since we don't really use secure software or systems, that point is kind of moot.
You may want to pose that question to Netflix. They account for about 1/3 of the traffic on the internet and all that traffic is served from FreeBSD servers.
Also, Mac OS X is essentially a fork of FreeBSD.
The OS on all Juniper equipment is a modified version of FreeBSD.
The Playstation 3 and 4 OS are both modified FreeBSD.
Plus more.
A new 10x faster network stack is coming to Linux via FreeBSD, enjoy your 10gb routing speeds with a 1ghz cpu and in user mode, not kernel. Nginx, that's BSD, Varnish, that's BSD. Actually, most OS research is done on FreeBSD, then ported to Linux. Anecdotally, several large datacenters are claiming they're seeing a rise in BSD services and VMs and some major customers with millions invested, switching to BSD from Linux.
One corp claimed to have over 10,000 VMs and paid RedHat for enterprise support for those VMs with a 5 year contract. They're still locked into contract, but they switched to FreeBSD because they can cut down their number of VMs by 30% and get the same performance. They also found it easier to manage FreeBSD. They're paying for that contract, but not using it. I bet that was a fun sell to management.
To play devil's advocate for a second (and from someone who is as opposed to the NSA's spying as anyone), they job is also to prevent adversarial spying on us. That presumably applies much more to government functions than day-to-day ones, but if, say, the military or state department actually follows the NSA's suggestions, there's a decent chance that those suggestions are pretty close to as good as it gets.
Well, he did produce OpenBSD, which could be seen as constructive criticism in a sense (instead of just complaining, build something). But yeah, if you mean constructively criticizing things in text, that's not really his strong point.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
He's often "technically correct". What I mean is that OpenBSD is really secure in its default setup... because it doesn't do fuck-all. Security via turning off everything isn't really that impressive. When something is supposedly so much superior on a security front, yet seems to get very little usage, well, there's a reason.
Also, even if you are right, you shouldn't be a dick about it. Perception matters in the world and if you want to persuade people to your position, you need some empathy. If you act like a jerk all the time, it puts people off and makes them dislike you, and thus not consider the content of your claims.