Are the BSDs dying? Some security researchers think so
Struck by the small number of reported BSD kernel vulnerabilities compared to Linux, von Sprundel sat down last summer and reviewed BSD source code in his spare time. "How come there are only a handful of BSD security kernel bugs advisories released every year?" he wanted to know. Is it because the BSDs are so much more secure? Or is it because no one is looking?
von Sprundel says he easily found around 115 kernel bugs across the three BSDs, including 30 for FreeBSD, 25 for OpenBSD, and 60 for NetBSD. Many of these bugs he called "low-hanging fruit." He promptly reported all the bugs, but six months later, at the time of his talk, many remained unpatched.
"By and large, most security flaws in the Linux kernel don't have a long lifetime. They get found pretty fast," von Sprundel says. "On the BSD side, that isn't always true. I found a bunch of bugs that have been around a very long time." Many of them have been present in code for a decade or more.
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