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talk about proactive auditing

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<p>
<h3><font color=#e00000><strong>OpenBSD Security Views</strong></font></h3>
OpenBSD believes in strong security.  Our aspiration is to be NUMBER
ONE in the industry for security.  Due to our open software
development model, we are able to take a more uncompromising view
towards increasing security than Sun, SGI, IBM, HP, or other vendors
are able to.

<p>
Like most members of the
<a href=http://www.geek-girl.com/bugtraq/index.html>
BUGTRAQ mailing list (which rarely sees OpenBSD security reports
these days :-)</a>,
we believe in full disclosure of security problems.  We have found
that the coding of proper fixes to security problems typically only
requires about 4-5 minutes of coding.  Thus we typically have fixes
available extremely quickly.

<p>

Our security auditing team typically has between six and twelve
members, and most of us continually search for and fix new security
holes. We have been auditing since the summer of 1997.  The process we
followed to increase security was simply a comprehensive file-by-file
analysis of every critical software component.  Flaws were found in
just about every area of the system.  Entire new classes of security
problems were found while we were doing the audit, and in many cases
source code which had been audited earlier had to be re-audited with
these new flaws in mind.

<p>
Our security auditing proces is a proactive one.  In almost all cases
we have found that exploitability is not an issue.  We have fixed many
simple and obvious careless programming errors in code and then only
months later discovered that the problems were in fact exploitable.
The proactive auditing process has really paid off.  Statements like
``This problem was fixed in OpenBSD about 6 months ago'' have become
commonplace in security forums like BUGTRAQ.

<p>
The auditing process is not over yet, and as you can see we continue
to find and fix new security flaws.

<p>
<h3><font color=#e00000><strong>OpenBSD 2.1 Security Advisories</strong></font></h3>
These are the OpenBSD 2.1 advisories.  All these problems are solved
in OpenBSD 2.2.  Some of these problems still exist in other
operating systems.

<ul>
<li><a href=rfork>Rfork() system call flaw (patch included)</a>
<li><a href=procfs>Procfs flaws (patch included)</a>
<li><a href=signals>Deviant Signals (patch included)</a>
</ul>

<p>
<h3><font color=#e00000><strong>OpenBSD 2.2 Security Advisories</strong></font></h3>
These are the OpenBSD 2.2 advisories.  All these problems are
solved in OpenBSD current.  Some of these problems still exist in other
operating systems.

<ul>
<li><a href=/errata.html#f00f>Intel P5 f00f lockup (patch included)</a>
<li><a href=/errata.html#sourceroute>
	Sourcerouted Packet Acceptance (patch included)</a>
<li><a href=/errata.html#ruserok>Setuid coredump & Ruserok() flaw (patch included)</a>
<li><a href=/errata.html#mmap>Read-write mmap() flaw (patch included)</a>
</ul>

<p>
<h3><font color=#e00000><strong>Other Resources</strong></font></h3>
Other security advisories that have (in the past) affected OpenBSD can
be found at the <a href=http://www.secnet.com/nav1.html>Secure Networks archive</a>.

<p> If you find a new security problem, you can mail it to
<a href=mailto:deraadt@openbsd.org>deraadt@openbsd.org</a>.
<br>
If you wish to PGP encode it (but please only do so if privacy is very
urgent, since it is inconvenient) use this <a href=pgpkey>pgp key</a>.

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$OpenBSD: security.html,v 1.15 1998/02/19 22:37:51 deraadt Exp $
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