Users

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Another connotation of the term is "who is using the system, and for what?", and that is the subject of the rest of this page. These companies and organizations trust OpenBSD's rigorous code audit and security-first development model. They use the system to build firewalls, intrusion detection systems, or general purpose servers. University researchers and IT department developers often have similar security and stability requirements and choose OpenBSD. Many Internet Service Providers find OpenBSD's security features hard to resist.

If you would like to be listed on this page, send the information to press@openbsd.org .

NOTE: For reasons of security, companies can ask us to withhold their names, or those of their clients. They would then appear as "Undisclosed Company".

Research and other Non-Commercial Users

Amnesty International
Amnesty International is a worldwide campaigning movement that works to promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards. Amnesty International is using OpenBSD for network firewalls and for Virtual Private Networks (IPsec) between its sections around the world.

ENEP Iztacala
ENEP Iztacala is one of UNAM's peripheral schools. UNAM is Mexico's largest University, with over 250,000 students, and at ENEP Iztacala we have a bit over 10,000 students. This is mostly a health-oriented campus, so the computer area is not a big one.
We run as servers currently two OpenBSD, one Solaris and two Linux boxes. With OpenBSD we handle the main web site (happily running on a 7-year old Sparcstation 5), part of our mail accounts and our firewall.
There are two additional OpenBSD computers, in our development area. One of them acts as a network monitor (using Snort) and will shortly be moved to sit next to the firewall, and the other one serves as an OpenBSD CVS mirror (CVSROOT=anoncvs@anoncvs.mx.openbsd.org:/cvs).
We do not do run very creative stuff, we just use OpenBSD for what it does best: run smoothly, even on older hardware, freeing us from most concerns and doubts we have about our other operating systems.
We also host a Spanish OpenBSD mailing list (openbsd@tlali.iztacala.unam.mx).

Helsinki University Central Hospital, Finland
The Hospital District of Helsinki and Uusimaa (HUS), with staff totaling approx. 18.000, provides specialized medical care for the residents of the capital and other member local authorities. OpenBSD is used for DNS, mail gateway, VPN and firewall solutions both on the internal campus network and on the Internet.

INFN Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, Florence, Italy
This non-profit government research and academic institution uses OpenBSD for domain name service and IPF firewall packet filtering.

Prague Institute of Chemical Technology, Czech Republic
The university uses OpenBSD on PCs to provide WWW, mail and shell access to staff and students, and on a SPARC IPX for a time server and secondary DNS. The admin stations also run PCs with OpenBSD.

Sonora State Electoral Council, México
El Consejo Estatal Electoral del Estado de Sonora usa OpenBSD para proteger sus sistemas, estas aplicaciones estan en linea a traves de Internet, dando resultados electorales al usuario, su red privada esta protegida por usuarios internos y externos.
This government agency uses OpenBSD as a means to protect its network as well as for intrusion detection. The OpenBSD based VPN provides online electoral results to both internal and external users.

The University of Alberta
uses OpenBSD on SPARC and Intel hardware for proxy servers, Kerberos servers, print servers, service monitoring, pre-emptive security scanning, and incident response. OpenBSD on Intel Hardware is used for Firewalls and Lan-to-Lan VPN for the university's secured subnets behind which all the University's new administrative systems reside. OpenBSD is used for authenticating gateways in front of public labs and public ethernet jacks in approximately 40 locations across campus (about 1500 seats) to help secure public internet access. The Department of Computing Science is using two 20 seat OpenBSD labs for undergraduate instruction.

The University of Michigan's Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI)
The CITI laboratory uses OpenBSD as the basis for many intensive research projects. OpenBSD is used for developing and analyzing smart card contents and protocols, both in isolation and in real applications. Plans are underway to issue cards containing secure tokens for user logins and kerberos ticket acquisition. OpenBSD is also used as a test platform for the mobile computing program at CITI. Internally "The Packet Vault" is an OpenBSD machine that captures and records on cd-rom every packet on the local 10 Mbps ethernet. Packet contents are encrypted to comply with privacy requirements. This practice is used for intrusion detection. In addition, a number of people within the department are using OpenBSD as their primary operating system.

The University of Minnesota
This university uses OpenBSD on Sun Sparc workstations for network monitoring and capacity planning. They query 53,000 (as of May 1999) different interfaces via SNMP, logging more than 250MB of SNMP data to concatenated disk for processing each month.

Uppsala University Hospital, Department of Infectious Diseases
The department uses OpenBSD for intranet servers, as well as for firewalls and gateways to the Internet.

Commercial Users

Adobe Systems
This software giant uses OpenBSD on a number of their network firewalls and network testing systems.

Alteon Networks
The gigabit ethernet hardware manufacturer, uses OpenBSD machines in varying capacities ranging from testbeds to gateways.

CORE SDI S.A.
An Information Security company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina uses OpenBSD as the main platform for operation and development of information security related products. "The robustness, portability and commitment to security of OpenBSD, as well as the ability to run on different hardware platforms, provides an ideal operating system for environments where security and high availability are major concerns", says Ivan Arce, CORE SDI's CEO.

FSC Internet Corp.
A large Information Security and Internet development firm located in Toronto, has used OpenBSD and its IPsec support to construct a secure and flexible VPN for a multi-billion dollar client. "We are delighted with OpenBSD's performance, reliability, and pro-active attitude towards security," says a company spokesperson. "We intend to use OpenBSD in many future projects. We believe strongly that open-source solutions like OpenBSD are best able to provide the high levels of security our clients require -- closed-source software almost never receives the level of code review that OpenBSD is committed to."

Network Security Technologies, Inc.
This network and computer security firm uses OpenBSD for high speed intrusion detection, virtual private networking, and data warehousing applications. Network Security Technologies, Inc is located in the Washington DC metro area, and uses OpenBSD at several undisclosed military and government agency locations.

SoftQuad Software Inc.
This maker of HTML and XML editing software uses OpenBSD for their gateway/firewall and FTP services.

Xtime
Xtime's core technology is the Time Inventory Management Engine, or TIMEngine ™. This technology brings the benefits of e-commerce to service merchants everywhere, making their time-based inventory available via the web or phone, and delivering powerful new customer relationship management capabilities. Xtime leverages the power of OpenBSD for 75% of their mission-critical network infrastructure, which includes Mail servers, DNS servers, several VPN/Firewalls, secure logging hosts, monitoring/IDS and production web servers. OpenBSD is the de-facto OS used by the Xtime network operations department, boasting a 100% usage rate amongst the department for desktop workstations.

Internet Service Providers

One goal of any ISP is to keep their customers' sites and accounts safe from intrusion. OpenBSD's security record speaks for itself, so many ISPs use OpenBSD for this reason alone. However, others use OpenBSD for many, if not most, of their services.

Anonix
Anonix is an ISP offering anonymous email, shell, and web hosting services.  All of these, plus DNS and billing, are run on OpenBSD.
"We feel confident in its security, and like its clean, layered approach.   The basic install doesn't have huge amounts of unnecessary baggage; we can be sure that everything on our systems belongs there."

BS Web Services
BS Web Services, a german ISP, is using OpenBSD servers for primary and secondary DNS (djbdns), primary Web hosting (Apache) and primary mail services (qmail-ldap). They also run mission critical LDAP Authentication Backend on OpenBSD (OpenLDAP), as well as MySQL databases. Hostmaster Henning Brauer writes:
"OpenBSD needed some tuning on these machines, especially bigger maxprocs and maxfiles, but it handles extraordinary loads on ordinary hardware. We are using AMD Athlons (mostly the new Thunderbirds) and AMD K6-III's. We also have some internal machines running OpenBSD as testbeds and printservers and all sorts of other purposes. We plan to move some more machines to OpenBSD, especially our firewalls. Unfortunately we are still running some closed source software, but we'd like to try the Linux emulation. OpenBSD's behaviour under high load, especially under DoS attacks, just doesn't compare to the Linux we used before - Linux went extremely slow, while OpenBSD doesn't even care (same hardware!)".

Calyx Internet Access Corp.
This company uses OpenBSD for running all mission-critical services including WWW, FTP, email, VPN traffic, and network monitoring at its data centers in New York, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. Even larger web sites such as snapple.com, tanqueray.com and others are no challenge for OpenBSD.

Crown.Net
This internet service provider is running almost completely on a mixture of OpenBSD/sparc and OpenBSD/i386. Our Web Servers(2), Mail Server, Primary and Secondary DNS, and Radius servers all are running OpenBSD/sparc and our shell server and several co-located servers are running OpenBSD/i386.

Elixor Networks Inc.
Elixor Networks uses OpenBSD on AMD hardware to provide shell accounts, website hosting, and domain name hosting.

Empire Net
An ISP in Bend, Oregon, uses OpenBSD on AMD, Intel, and Sun based hardware, for routing, firewalling, IPsec (VPN), bandwidth limiting, web hosting, database servers, network monitoring, intrusion detection, mail servers, backup servers, cache servers, and workstations. One of their OpenBSD routers handles traffic on between a T3 and eight fast ethernet ports, also with several 802.1Q VLANs to separate networks for co-location customers and business park tenants. An OpenBSD mail server handles e-mail storage/retrieval and RADIUS authentication for over 5,000 users. Several OpenBSD web servers each handle over 300 web sites.

Globalwire Communications
Globalwire Communications is using OpenBSD on their Short Message Service (SMS) gateway and database servers.

Hobbiton.org
This ISP used OpenBSD to run their free shell server for many years (it was shut down in January, 2001 due to rising costs of running a "free" service). They also use OpenBSD on other systems. The shell server, a single AMD Athlon 650, handled at the end 101,796 users. "We tried OpenBSD after having constant security problems with other operating systems", said Hobbiton's Leif Pedersen. "Since then, security in the operating system has not been a problem and, as an added bonus, the systems have been more stable."

Hurontario.net
In the Headwaters region of Ontario, Canada, Hurontario.net uses OpenBSD on several of their own and their customers' machines.

IOActive
IOActive provides WWW developers and hackers with a place to tinker on test servers. The Seattle, WA, service provider also installs OpenBSD firewall, VPN and IDS systems for regional businesses. "OpenBSD is fast, reliable, and I sleep a little better at night knowing I'm using it," says owner Josh Pennell. "The other thing I love about it is over half of the work is done to secure the box right after installation, saving my company copious amounts of time. OpenBSD in my mind is the defacto standard for open source secure operating systems. Everyone else is just trying to catch up".

Poppe Tyson Europe is using OpenBSD as a primary DNS, mailserver for 100+ mailboxes, and as their Website Development server for over 50 sites.

qpalzm.com services
qpalzm services runs OpenBSD to offer web hosting and shell accounts. The website offers daily updates on programming, gaming, irc, and other technobabble. An online MUD is also available. There is also a JavaScript Mailing List using OpenBSD for the benefit of those interested in JavaScript and DHTML. Incidently, qpalzm.com's busy WWW, FTP and mail server runs just fine with OpenBSD on a 200MHz Pentium Pro.

RTMX Networking Services
This North Carolina ISP is using OpenBSD on multiple servers for Web, DNS and over 1000 e-mail users in their community just West of Research Triangle. There is a mix of AMD K-6, MicroSPARC-II and PowerPC systems in use, with more customer sub-net servers coming on-line. RTMX.NET mirrors the OpenBSD WWW and ftp sites, and also provides an anonymous CVS repository (CVSROOT=anoncvs@openbsd.groupbsd.org:/cvs), all thanks to 47GB of disk space and a dedicated T1 connection.

Swebase Network
This ISP in Sweden uses OpenBSD for Web, DNS and mail servers.

WytheNet, Inc.
This Virginia ISP uses OpenBSD on all of its servers, including primary and secondary radius, primary and secondary DNS, mail, network monitoring, and several firewalls. They also sell OpenBSD based routers and firewalls to their business DSL customers.