Security Portal: Why We’re Doomed to Failure

“I’m in a strange mood and was thinking about various things,
one of which was the quantity of information on the weekly Linux
security digest. I was doing the BSD digest a few days ago, and it
struck me, OpenBSD has far fewer problems. To be fair they are not
100% free of security problems, but they are closer then most to
that goal. I think the following quote sums up a lot of this
article:”

“Security is a process, not a solution.“

“Even if we design a process that is fault tolerant, very
robust, and easy to implement, we are still doomed to failure in
almost all cases. One of the most popular ways to break into
computer systems is through the buffer overflow. This is usually
due to a fault in the way the software handles user input, network
traffic, command line arguments, and so on, in programs that run as
root (setuid programs, or network daemons that do not drop
privileges properly). The most obvious solution to this problem
would be to audit the software and remove any potential problems,
OpenBSD took this route, and it has worked relatively well.
However, it is not a panecea.”

Complete
Story