has OpenBSD got access team working

has OpenBSD got access team working

[Ian Blackburn]

If you want a (Unix-like) operating system that was designed
with security in mind, you should use OpenBSD (which can be 
found at: http://www.openbsd.org). 

may be we can get too carried away everything to do with computer
programming rellies upon human work so is likely to have some whole in it
somewhere 



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Re: has OpenBSD got access team working

[Gil Andre]

Hi!

On Fri, 14 Dec 2001 08:44:47 +0800
Ian Blackburn <iblackburn@gesb.wa.gov.au> wrote:

> 
> If you want a (Unix-like) operating system that was designed
> with security in mind, you should use OpenBSD (which can be 
> found at: http://www.openbsd.org). 
> 
> may be we can get too carried away everything to do with computer
> programming rellies upon human work so is likely to have some whole in it
> somewhere 

That is true. Still, it is possible to program in a very safe
manner -- it requires more work than "normal" programming, but
it is possible.

The entire philosophy of OpenBSD is that security problems are
"bugs", and that good software should not have bugs in it. The
entire OpenBSD team therefore decided to make sure their OS
had as little bugs as possible. They audited the entire source
code for several *years* and keep on searching for possible
security problems all the time. Once a problem has been found
somewhere, they look for the same problem everywhere and correct
it if it appears anywhere else.

Finally, the OpenBSD team makes sure that very few services are
activated by default, and try to offer secure alternative to
unsecure programs. For instance, OpenSSH is designed to replace
"insecure" protocols such as telnet, rcp, and FTP.

This whole process results in a very secure OS. One which is *not*
perfect, but very secure indeed. You can check the "Errata" page
of the OpenBSD web site -- it's quite instructive to see there are
about a dozen patches *per year* for each version of OpenBSD, while
I constantly receive dozens of patches *per week* for Linux. And
I am not even going to mention Windows, where a single application
such as Outlook has to be corrected again and again to close basic
security problems.

So, is OpenBSD perfect? No. Is it better than most at security?
Yes.


_______________________________________________

Gil Andre -- Technical Writer -- Knox Software
            gandre@arkeia.com
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