Notices by Goblin (goblin@crispsandwi.ch)

The student has been running around with a massive grin on his face since. He even phoned his mum to boast proudly.

Contrast this with what happened when he found a small bug in Debian and the devs laughed at him.

I love #OpenBSD, but a random act of kindness by its devs like this, giving time and attention to a student is remarkable, and unheard of from any other project.

Dunno what it is but the BSDs are just friendly and I’m happy to be a user of such a friendly OS. Its just fab.

(3/3)

The (open access) version of the paper is here, if anyone cares. Turns out OpenBSD gets a lot more use of its sandboxing mechanisms in its packages than other OSs (and maybe theres a reason for that…)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.06447

(4/3)

My student was terrified, but he spent the evening emailing back and forth with him discussing things, and Theo was kind enough to have a look at another of my students papers and gave comments.

He also gave a load of historical context for how pledge and unveil had been developed and where seccomp had got it wrong.

This never happens. It’s rare enough that your scientific work gets read by anyone—nevermind one of the most influential security experts working today.

(2/3)

Sometimes people ask me why I like #OpenBSD so much.

Over the weekend Theo de Raadt the founder of the whole project emailed me and my PhD student to say he liked our paper (and that it was 95% correct). We have never interacted with him before and the paper was published in a tiny workshop and on arXiv. He just stumbled on it.

(1/3)