990 karma · joined December 2, 2019
Sad times in cyberspace.
Just replace the twitter.com part of the tweet URL.
If you don't know about Pledge and Unveil you can think of it as similar to Firejail sandboxing from Linux but on steroids. It dynamically limits the types of kernel calls and filesystem addresses a process can make use of so if a rogue thread causes a process to perform an illegal operation under the Pledge rules OpenBSD will kill the process with SIGTERM. Whats more Pledge and Unveil allow the process to execute whatever calls are needed when the program initializes itself but it will relinquish the privilege to run those calls for the remainder of the program's runtime once it no longer needs them (after init).
> As nice as backward compatibility is from a user convenience perspective when this feature comes as a result of a static kernel Application Binary Interface this trade-off is essentially indistinguishable from increasing time-preference (or in other words declining concern for the future in comparison to the present).
I would argue that users are not using the system due to the lack of backward compatibility, rather my contention would be that this feature comes at a cost that outweighs the benefit (also from the article):
> This can be seen with a continuous layering of hacky fixes, sloppily 'bolted on' feature additions (built in such a way that new additions don't conflict with existing APIs), and unremovable remnants of abandoned code segments left in place purely to ensure that applications continue to run. These issues not only cause their own problems but, in aggregate, cause a huge creep in the number of lines of code in privileged memory. This does not grow the exploitability of a system linearly but rather it causes exploitability to grow exponentially due to the fact that by there being more code to exploit, malicious functionalities can be chained together and made more harmful.
This article centres around the details pertaining to the company's operations in and around 2016 when it launched the Crossrider malware as well as the founder's former employment with Unit 8200 (Israel's IDF Signal Intelligence operations unit).