OpenBSD Archive

BSD: OpenBSD 3.4 Announcement; DragonFly BSD Daily Snapshots

Submitted by smeg lister 2003-09-05 OpenBSD 18 Comments

The OpenBSD project has made available information as to what is new in the upcoming 3.4 release in November, while pre-ordering is available too. On other BSD news, Simon Schubert has offered to provide daily snapshots of DragonFly, the recent FreeBSD 4.x fork.

OpenBSD: improper kernel bounds check; OS Fingerprinting in Firewall

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-30 OpenBSD 7 Comments

OpenBSD's Todd Miller reports that an improper bounds check in the semget(2) system call can allow a local user to cause a kernel panic. No privilege escalation is possible, the attack simply runs the kernel out of memory. The bug was introduced in OpenBSD 3.3, previous versions of OpenBSD are unaffected. Earlier, Mike Frantzen has committed "Passive operating system fingerprinting" to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language.

OpenBSD’s PF Does OS Fingerprinting

Submitted by Jeremy Andrews 2003-08-23 OpenBSD 15 Comments

OpenBSD's stateful packet filter, PF, has recently added passive OS fingerprinting capabilities. This new functionality allows one to design packet filtering policy based around the source operating system. It is based on Michal Zalewski's p0f. The functionality was also added to tcpdump.

OpenBSD 3.4beta Tagged on CVS

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-12 OpenBSD 29 Comments

OpenBSD 3.3-current now turns 3.4-beta, as the cvs log says. More info at Deadly.org.

The Essence of OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-07-18 OpenBSD 31 Comments

A thousand open source projects quietly produce excellent code under the radar. What goes on in these projects? How do new people join? What motivation is there? Cameron Laird and George Peter Staplin interview several core OpenBSD developers.

AMD64, UltraSparc III and SMP Support in OpenBSD-CURRENT

Eugenia Loli 2003-06-22 OpenBSD 40 Comments

The OpenBSD folks are informing us that mozilla works in -current, the SMP branch works okay with a big lock on i386, the UltraSPARC III goes single user now and the AMD Hammer port: kernel works so far, toolchain/compiler stuff in the works now.

OpenBSD Gets Harder to Crack; Get to Know the HYDRA OS

Submitted by Social Engineer 2003-06-04 OpenBSD 18 Comments

The latest OpenBSD 3.3 release arrives with even stronger attack defenses coupled with an amazing record of just a single remotely exploitable vulnerability in more than seven years, the best security track record for any general-purpose operating system around. Read the review at eWeek.

OpenBSD Hackathon c2k3 Continues in Success

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-18 OpenBSD 10 Comments

The OpenBSD project is having currently its Hackathon event (despite their financial sponsor backing down last month), where all the developers are getting together to code for almost two weeks. Usually, that's the month of the year with the most CVS commits and the biggest advancements that are happening to the OS. Canada's tech media are reporting the event with more info.

NTFS Support for OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-14 OpenBSD 9 Comments

Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support.

OpenBSD 3.3 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-05-01 OpenBSD 35 Comments

OpenBSD 3.3 is out and more secure than ever. Get it while it's hot. Store, changelog.

DARPA Pulls OpenBSD Funding

Submitted by Anonymous 2003-04-18 OpenBSD 45 Comments

The open-source project's leader says the unused portion of a $2.3 million grant has been withdrawn due to concerns that it was mainly funding foreign researchers. OpenBSD would have 60 developers flying in from around the world (they bought their own tickets, non-refundable) for a Hackathon May 8 - 20, which is a major part of OpenBSD's development cycle. Follow the discussion here.

OpenBSD Team Fights Buffer Overflows

Eugenia Loli 2003-04-12 OpenBSD 35 Comments

The OpenBSD project hopes that new changes to its latest release will eliminate "buffer overflows," a software issue that has been plaguing security experts for more than three decades.

Porting The PF Stateful Packet Filter

Submitted by KernelTrap 2003-04-09 OpenBSD 8 Comments

KernelTrap offers an in depth look at the recent efforts to port OpenBSD's stateful packet filter, pf, to other operating systems.

OpenBSD’s SMP Status

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-29 OpenBSD 9 Comments

"An update on the current status of OpenBSD Symmetric Multiprocessor support was recently posted to the OpenBSD smp mailing list. At this time, it still looks to be quite a ways off in the future, with currently only i386-specific code that will detect and spinup a 2'nd processor, but not yet actually use it." Read the report at KernelTrap.

OpenBSD 3.3 Available for Pre-Order

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-27 OpenBSD 8 Comments

Continuing down the path of evolutionary development, release time for OpenBSD 3.3 grows near. Pre-orders of CD sets are now being accepted and new t-shirt designs are up. More at OpenBSD Journal.

Securing Small Networks with OpenBSD: NAT with pf

Eugenia Loli 2003-03-09 OpenBSD 3 Comments

OpenBSD's packet filter has really grown up. Since its introduction in OpenBSD 3.0, it has become an advanced tool for networking and security. In the first of four articles, Jacek Artymiak examines recent updates to pf. This week, he looks at Network Address Translation. The whole series of OpenBSD articles can be found here.

Theo on Security Improvements in OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-31 OpenBSD 12 Comments

From the OpenBSD Journal: In his post, Theo deRaadt gives a brief technical overview of the four major security changes in OpenBSD: POSIX page protection schemes, WorX, read only segments, and Propolice. Not all of these are on all platforms, but every platform has some protection. To quote Theo in his message, "We feel that these 4 technologies together will be a a royal pain in the a$$ for the typical buffer overflow attacker."

OpenBSD’s Battle For UltraSparc III Documentation

Guest post by Jeremy Andrews 2003-01-27 OpenBSD 17 Comments

In late November of 2002, OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt announced on the project's mailing lists that after over a year of attempting to obtain useful UltraSparc III documentation, they had still not made much headway. In the email he rallied the OpenBSD community to help out, asking them to contact the people within Sun responsible for providing such information. C/Net reported on this in their story titled, Open-source clan in spat with Sun. The UltraSparc III is Sun's third generation 64-bit RISC architecture based processor.

Patching OpenBSD

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-17 OpenBSD 8 Comments

"OpenBSD 3.2 is with us, and it's time to upgrade our systems to the latest release. As usual, it is strongly suggested that you install the latest release on a spare machine, apply patches, and test it until you are happy with what the OpenBSD gang gave us. Only then you should upgrade and patch the production machine. But how do you patch OpenBSD?" Read the article at OnLamp.

OpenBSD SMP Project Started

Submitted by Acheron 2002-12-09 OpenBSD 11 Comments

Acheron writes: "Spotted this on Deadly.org today. Four University of Waterloo students are working on adding SMP support to the OpenBSD kernel as their 4th year Computer Engineering Design Project. Their website can be found at Spinlocks.org. Best of luck to them."