Comment by zamalek
2 years ago
There have been cases where OpenBSD's hypothetical mitigations have worked out well for the project. I recall a relatively recent DNS cache poisoning attack that OpenBSD was novel in pre-emptively mitigating because something (I think it was the port?) was "needlessly" random.
If a mitigation has negligible performance impact, and doesn't introduce a new attack vector, I can't imagine why it would be seen as a bad thing.
> If a mitigation has negligible performance impact, and doesn't introduce a new attack vector, I can't imagine why it would be seen as a bad thing.
Because it creates confusion about your threat model, which can ultimately weaken your security.
Every mitigation is code and complexity. There is always a cost.
Not for every mitigation. There are plenty of cases where OpenBSD removed code and functionality because of security implications.
In this case we got a code exec.