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Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 19:14:52 +0100
To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
From: Eivind Eklund <eivind@dimaga.com>
Subject: Re: Increasing overall security.... 
Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
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At 08:40 AM 2/11/97 -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
>Keep in mind, as was recently pointed out to me, that just bringing in
>the OpenBSD patches will not make FreeBSD secure.  For that a top to
>bottom audit of code running at elevated priviledge must be 
>completed.  The patches will tend to make FreeBSD more secure, but you
>won't know until after you've audited if you've grabbed everything or
>not.

You won't ever know.  I do not believe FreeBSD (or any other major OS
written in C) will ever be 100% secure - there are too many pitfalls, and
too easy to write unsafe code.  However, we can always strive towards it,
and removing just *one* more of the easy breakins make it just that little
bit harder for the hackers.

A nice thing I've been noticing lately is that when I do security audits
for selected parts of the 2.1.6 code and find exploits, they tend to be
fixed in -current already.  That at least show that the obvious stuff is
going away.



Eivind Eklund  perhaps@yes.no  http://maybe.yes.no/perhaps/
eivind@freebsd.org