← Back to context

Comment by unethical_ban

16 hours ago

Here's a general question, are these vulnerabilities hitting Linux more than BSDs due to hit being a larger target or because its architecture is less secure by design?

11 comments

unethical_ban

Reply
vsgherzi  15 hours ago

It’s two things. 1. Less eyes are on the bsds

2. Bsds don’t have the same optimizations that Linux has. Bsds generally try to pursue corrrectness

That being said there were just a bunch of vulnerabilities in freebsd

macOS has had its own dirty cow attack and I know there’s for sure more memory ones just based on the way the xnu kernel works.

So no Linux isn’t really worse per say

staticassertion  15 hours ago

Larger target.

  • golem14  14 hours ago

    in many ways:

    - more people are using it (assuming macos is in its own bucket perhaps) - bigger surface areas (esp NetBSD has in my limited understanding just less stuff that can go boom) - more churn, ie more new stuff than can be buggy released more often.

    Of course, because of that, more eyes are on Linux, so I'm not sure where that security tradeoff is.

ahartmetz  15 hours ago

AFAIU, Linux and the BSDs have basically the same architecture - the BSDs just value secure and simple, understandable code more highly than Linux vs features and performance.