alt Hacker News> The result: roughly 50 distinct issues uncovered across multiple kernel subsystems
> Our goal isn’t to break FreeBSD, but to highlight the systemic difficulty of maintaining strict isolation in a large, mature codebase.
50 distinct issues? That's devastating. If these researchers found 50 issues, we all know there's more that 50 issues in the codebase.
I really think we need to start seriously considering using SeL4 as a base for our operating systems. How long can we keep building on top of sand?
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> 50 distinct issues? That's devastating. If these researchers found 50 issues, we all know there's more that 50 issues in the codebase.
That's rough but for a systematic search of a large system it seems reasonable. Theres a good chance that these 50 represent most the "easy" vulnerabilities if the researchers did a thorough job. In a way it seems more likely than if they found a smaller number.
Looks like great work, worth mentioning it starts with assumption of being root in jail.
As long as there is no real liability for getting hacked and as long as companies don't want to pay for proper software development. And note that FreeBSD is one of the harder nuts in this sense. Any codebase beyond a few hundred lines will have one or more of these if you look hard and long enough. But: these 50 are now squashed and that's a nice Christmas gift.
If the companies that use this stuff commercially would contribute back 1% of the value they derive from using open source this could be bullet proof.