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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 12 2016, @11:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the all-it-takes-is-time-and-money dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The developers of FreeBSD have announced they'll change the way they go about their business, after users queried why known vulnerabilities weren't being communicated to users.

This story starts with an anonymous GitHub post detailing some vulnerabilities in the OS, specifically in freebsd-update, libarchive, bspatch and portsnap. Some of the problems in that post were verified and the FreeBSD devs started working on repairs.

But over on the FreeBSD security list, threads like this started asking why users weren't being told much about the bugs or remediation efforts. That's a fair question because updating FreeBSD could in some circumstances actually expose users to the problem.

Now the FreeBSD team has answered those questions by saying “As a general rule, the FreeBSD Security Officer does not announce vulnerabilities for which there is no released patch.”

The operating system's developers and security team are now “reviewing this policy for cases where a proof-of-concept or working exploit is already public.”

That post also explains that the team is considering more detailed security advisories. There's also an admission that the proposed patch may have broken other things in the OS.

The post concludes by saying that the FreeBSB core and security teams are working with all due haste to fix things and will let those subscribed to its mailing lists know when patches are ready and the danger is past.

[The majority of SoylentNews.org's servers run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Long Term Stable version). Upgrading to version 16.04 LTS would expose our systems to systemd and there has been some discussion among staff about our options. One option under consideration would be FreeBSD. Are there any Soylentils who run FreeBSD? What has your experience been? Any surprises to share with the community? --martyb]


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @12:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 12 2016, @12:33PM (#386980)

    Security is as much a function of the admin as it is the product used.

    I have had a good experience with FreeBSD. FreeBSD having jails, ZFS, up to date software, and in place upgrades is hard to beat. The patch and port vulnerabilities are concerning, but don't really apply to my use case. In order for this to affect me, attackers would need to somehow MiTM me on my internal network (I am already breached at that point, so it is a moot point) or compromise FreeBSD.org's servers. I'm not going to go into detail with how my network and servers are setup, but the chances of this being exploited undetected are very low. Not only that, there is a work around. FreeBSD can be patched using their SVN repo, which uses TLS.

    FreeBSD + ZFS + jails makes testing bullet proof and easy because if you use ZFS clones, it guarantees an identical system on identical hardware with an identical configuration. It only takes a few minutes to clone a jail, so screwing up your test jail takes only a few minutes to recover from.

    There is a very easy fix that would require very little effort on the FreeBSD developers and server admins parts. Since the exploits require MiTM, one word. TLS. Let's Encrypt and Startcom offer free certificates. Post a sed script to the mailing list and RSS to update the config files with the URLs. Mitigated. Now they can take their time fixing the utilities.

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