"To start, we must clarify at a bare minimum what a secure operating system can be considered to be. Generally, this would be taken to mean an operating system that was designed with security in mind, and provides various methods and tools to implement security polices and limits on the system. This definition cannot be applied to OpenBSD as OpenBSD was not designed with security in mind and provides no real way to lock down and limit a system above standard UNIX permissions, which are insufficient.
"Despite this OpenBSD is widely regarded as being one of the most secure operating systems currently available. The OpenBSD approach to security is primarily focused on writing quality code, with the aim being to eliminate vulnerabilities in source code. To this end, the OpenBSD team has been quite successful, with the base system having had very few vulnerabilities in "a heck of a long time".
"While this approach is commendable, it is fundamentally flawed when compared to the approach taken by various extended access control frameworks.
"The extended access control frameworks that I refer to are generally implementations of MAC, RBAC, TE or some combination or variation of these basic models. There are many different implementations, generally written for Linux due to its suitability as a testing platform. The most popular implementations are summarized below.
"SELinux is based on the FLASK architecture, is developed primarily by the NSA, and ships with some Linux distributions by default, such as Debian and Fedora. SELinux implements a form of MAC known as Domain and Type Enforcement.
"RSBAC is developed by German developer Dr. Amon Ott, and is an implementation of the GFAC architecture. RSBAC provides many models to choose from such as MAC, RBAC and an extensive ACL model. RSBAC ships with the Hardened Gentoo distribution."
