Miller on Mac OS X, Chrome, Firefox, Economics
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 20th Mar 2009 13:51 UTC, submitted by google_ninja
Privacy, Security, Encryption Fresh from winning the PWN2OWN contest yesterday, Charlie Miller has been interviewed by ZDNet. He talks about how Mac OS X is a very simple operating system to exploit due to the lack of any form of anti-exploit features. He also explains that the underlying operating system is much more important in creating a successful exploit than the bowser, why Chrome is so hard to hack, and many other things.
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RE[2]: Operating System Security
by rajj on Fri 20th Mar 2009 17:22 UTC in reply to "RE: Operating System Security"
rajj
Member since:
2005-07-06

The BSD's, and OpenBSD in particular, have had very few remotely exploitable bugs in a default install. IIRC, OpenBSD has only had two in over ten years now.

Reply Parent Score: 1

sakeniwefu Member since:
2008-02-26

The BSD's, and OpenBSD in particular, have had very few remotely exploitable bugs in a default install.


OpenBSD has a lot of measures no other OS uses or has started to use only recently(eg. ASLR in Win and Linux) which make the very few bugs very difficult(as in almost impossible) to exploit.

As the interviewee makes clear, it is this sort of thing, ASLR, sandboxes, stack canaries, etc. that make an attacker's life difficult.

*BSD and MacOS X have been disregarding those features because they negatively affect performance, and now they are reaping the fruits of shame.

Bugs might be a lot or a handful, but if you do nothing to keep the attackers' from playing around with your unpatched bugs, the game is over for you.

Reply Parent Score: 6